Performing Nation

Sinica Leidensia
Edited by

Barend J. ter Haar

Maghiel van Crevel
In co-operation with

P.K. Bol, W.L. Idema, D.R. Knechtges,

E.S. Rawski, H.T. Zurndorfer

VOLUME 91

Performing Nation
Gender Politics in Literature, Theater, and the
Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880-1940

Edited by

Doris Croissant
Catherine Vance Yeh
Joshua S. Mostow

LEIDEN BOSTON
2008

On the cover: Kainosh Tadaoto, Mei Lan Fang, about 1924, color on silk, 40.8 33.3 cm;
Collection of Kachuan Seiko Museum, Kyoto. Courtesy of Mr. Masayoshi Kainosho.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Performing nation : gender politics in literature, theater, and the visual arts of China and
Japan, 1880-1940 / edited by Doris Croissant, Catherine Vance Yeh, Joshua S. Mostow.
p. cm. (Sinica leidensia ; 91)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17019-3 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Arts, Chinese19th century. 2. Arts, Chinese20th century. 3. Arts, Japanese19th
century. 4. Arts, Japanese20th century. 5. Femininity in art. 6. Masculinity in art.
I. Croissant, Doris. II. Yeh, Catherine Vance. III. Mostow, Joshua S., 1957NX583.A1P47 2008
700.95109034dc22
2008027835

ISSN: 0169-9563
ISBN: 978 90 04 17019 3
Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV
provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center,
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Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands

contents

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Color Plates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii
ix
xvii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

part one
ENGENDERING THE NATION-STATE
1. Equality, Modernity, and Gender in Chinese Nationalism 19
John Fitzgerald
2. Banknote Design as a Battlefield of Gender Politics and
National Representation in Meiji Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
55
Melanie Trede
3. The Culturally Contested Student Body: N Xuesheng
at the Turn of the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Joan Judge

part two
WOMAN AS LITERARY METAPHOR
4. Love Martyrs and Love Cheaters at the End of the
Chinese Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Keith McMahon
5. Gender and Formation of the Modern Literary Field
in Japan: Women and the Position of the Novel,
1880s-1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tomi Suzuki
6. Failed Modern Girls in Early-Twentieth-Century China
Tze-lan D. Sang

135

143
179

vi

contents

part three
PERFORMING ARTS AND GENDER ROLE-PLAYING
7. Politics, Art, and Eroticism: The Female Impersonator
as the National Cultural Symbol of Republican China
Catherine Vance Yeh
8. Two Actresses in Three Acts: Gender, Theater, and
Nationalism in Modern Japan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ayako Kano

205

241

part four
ART, SEXUALITY, AND NATIONAL EROTICS
9. From Madonna to Femme Fatale: Gender Play in
Japanese National Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Doris Croissant
10. Nationally Naked? The Female Nude in Japanese Oil
Painting and Posters (1890s-1920s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jaqueline Berndt
11. The Allure of a Woman in Chinese Dress:
Representation of the Other in Imperial Japan . . . . . . .
Ikeda Shinobu
12. Utagawa Shunga, Kukis Chic, and the Construction
of a National Erotics in Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Joshua S. Mostow
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

265

307

347

383

425
429

contents

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many of the essays in this volume were first presented at the international conference entitled New Gender Constructs in Literature, the
Visual and the Performing Arts of Modern China and Japan, held 27-30
October 2004 in Heidelberg, Germany. This collection of multidisciplinary studies presents a rare attempt to correlate the conjunctions
of nation building, gender, and representation in late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century China and Japan. Focusing on gender formation, the essays explore the changing constructs of masculinities and
femininities in China and Japan from the Early Modern up to the
1930s. Most focus on the dynamism that links the remodeling of
traditional arts and media to the political and cultural power relations between China, Japan, and the Western world.
The original conference was sponsored by the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum der Universitt Heidelberg and the Foundation Universitt Heidelberg, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German
Research Foundation), the Japan Foundation, and the Chiang Chingkuo Foundation. We thank these institutions for their generous support. Special thanks are owed to the patient collaboration of the
contributors to this volume, and the commitment and skilled services
of the staff of Brill, particular its executive editor, Patricia Radder.

viii

contents

list of figures

ix

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1.
Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.4.

Figure 2.5.
Figure 2.6.
Figure 2.7.
Figure 2.8.

Figure 2.9.
Figure 2.10.

Figure 2.11.

Figure 2.12.

One-yen banknote, designed and engraved by Edoardo

Chiossone (1833-1898), 7.7 13.1 cm, 1881; Banknote and
Postage Stamp Museum, Tokyo. .............................................
One-yen, five-yen and ten-yen banknotes, designed and
engraved by Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898), 1881, 1882, and
1883, respectively; Banknote and Postage Stamp Museum,
Tokyo. .....................................................................................
Detail of ten-yen banknote, designed and engraved by
Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898), 9.3 15.9 cm, 1883;
Banknote and Postage Stamp Museum, Tokyo. A color plate
of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp.
xvii-xxxii. .................................................................................
Portraits of all Emperors and Ancestral Deities of Great Japan (DaiNihon
jink mank goshkei), hanging scroll, lithograph, 98.2 45.8
cm, 1890s, Vlkerkundemuseum der von Portheim-Stiftung,
Heidelberg (call no. 37674-045), and Inge Klinger. ................
Jing kg engi emaki, handscroll, Detail of scroll 2, ink and
colors on paper, height 35.4 cm; 1433; Konda Hachiman
Shrine, Habikino-shi. ..............................................................
Jing figure in the Funeboko float, Gion Festival, Kyoto,
diverse media, 1616; photograph by the author. ....................
Sankan taiji zue, double-spread designed by Katsushika Taito
(fl. 1810-1853), woodblock-printed book, 1844; National Diet
Library, Tokyo. ........................................................................
Decoration for the Boys Festival, mid-nineteenth century,
diverse materials, size of the Jing figure: 41.9 20.8
19.3 cm (height including the eboshi hat: 50.0 cm), originally
belonging to the Irie Family. ...................................................
Ukita Ikkei (1795-1859), Empress Jing, Takeuchi no Sukune and
Prince jin, diptych of hanging scrolls, each 98.5 34.6 cm, ink
and color on silk; Tochigi Prefectural Museum. .....................
Katsukawa Shuntei (1770-1820), Empress Jing, series: Buy
sanban tsuzuki [Three examples of martial bravery]; 1820;
signed: Shksai Katsukyko Shuntei ga; poetry club seal:
Taikogawa; surimono print, shikishiban (21.8 18.9 cm);
photograph courtesy of Joan Mirviss (owner: Barbara Bowman). .......................................................................................
Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), Empress Jing Watching the
Victorious Return of her Fleet from Korea, from the series: Kenjo
hakkei [Eight views of virtuous women], ca. 1843, ch tanzaku
(ca. 38 13 cm), signed: Ichiysai Kuniyoshi ga, publisher:
Ihaya Sensabur, censor seal: Tanaka (Tanaka Heijir),
Merlin Dailey Collection. .......................................................
Ten-yen Japanese National Banknote (old style), 8 19 cm,
1873; Bank of Japan, Currency Museum, Tokyo. A color

58

59

60

65
70
75
78

79
80

82

84

Figure 2.13.
Figure 2.14.

Figure 2.15.

Figure 2.16.

Figure 2.17.
Figure 3.1.
Figure 3.2.
Figure 3.3.
Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.2.
Figure 7.3.

Figure 7.4.

Figure 7.5.

Figure 7.6.
Figure 7.7.

list of figures
plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on
pp. xvii-xxxii. ...........................................................................
Ten-dollar United States banknote, 8 19 cm, 1864; Bank of
Japan, Currency Museum, Tokyo. ..........................................
500-yen bonds, designed and engraved by Edoardo Chiossone
(1833-1898), 1878, lithograph, 24.5 23 cm; Banknote
and Postage Stamp Museum, Tokyo. A color plate of this
illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii
Bulletin of National History (Kokushi kiy), detail with a depiction of
the victorious Jing receiving tributes from the Korean Kings,
woodblock-printed book, 1885; Waseda University Library,
Tokyo. .....................................................................................
Newly edited History Textbook for Primary Schools (Shinsen shgaku
rekishi), detail with Jing, warships and a map of Korea,
woodblock-printed book, 1887; Waseda University Library,
Tokyo. .....................................................................................
Maruki Riy (1850-1923), Suzuki Shinichi II (1855/
1859-1912), and Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898), Empress
Shken, photograph, 1889; Meiji Shrine, Tokyo. ...................
Maochong nxuesheng zhi huangkan [The ridiculous
practice of pretending to be female students], THRB 27 (11
September 11 1909). ...............................................................
Shuchang yu xuetang zhi guanxi [The relationship between
schools and brothels], THRB 130 (23 December 23 1909). ....
Datong shijie zhi nann [Males and females in a world of
great unity], THRB 66 (20 October 20 1909). ........................
Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in Pavilion of the Royal
Monument (Yu bei ting); from Mei Shaowu, ed., Mei Lanfang
([Pictorial album] Mei Lanfang) (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe,
1997). ......................................................................................
Cartoon, Tokyo Puck, 1 September 1910; reprinted by Rykei
Shoten, Tokyo, 1996. ..............................................................
Calligraphy dedicated to Mei Lanfang by Feng Gengguang
(Youwei) on the occasion of the publication of Murata Uks
edited volume Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei
Lanfang] (Tokyo: Genbunsha, 1919). .....................................
Calligraphy dedicated to Mei Lanfang by kura Kihachir
on the occasion of the publication of Murata Uks edited
volume Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei
Lanfang] (Tokyo: Genbunsha, 1919). .....................................
Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in The Drunken Beauty
Guifei (Guifei zui jiu); from Murata Uk, Shinageki to Bai Ranh
[Chinese theater and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo: Genbunsha,
1919). ......................................................................................
Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in Rainbow Pass (Ni
hong guan); from Murata Uk, Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese
theater and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo: Genbunsha, 1919). ..........
Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in The Heavenly Maid
Showering Flowers (Tian n san hua); from Murata Uk, Shinageki
to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo:
Genbunsha, 1919). ..................................................................

86
88

92

95

96
101
116
119
120

206
221

223

224

225
226

228

list of figures
Figure 7.8.

Figure 7.9.

Figure 7.10.
Figure 8.1.

Figure 8.2.
Figure 8.3.
Figure 8.4.
Figure 8.5.
Figure 8.6.
Figure 8.7.

Figure 8.8.
Figure 8.9.
Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.2.

Figure 9.3.

Figure 9.4.

Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in Mulan, the Disguised

Warrior Maiden (Mulan congjun); from Murata Uk, Shinageki to Bai
Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo: Genbunsha,
1919). ......................................................................................
Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in [The precious sword
named] Yuzhou feng (Yuzhou feng); from A. C. Scott, Mei Lan-Fang:
The Life and Times of a Peking Actor (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 1959). ...........................................................
Kainosh Tadaoto, Mei Lan Fang, about 1924, color on
silk, 40.8 33.3 cm; Collection of Kachuan Seiko Museum,
Kyoto. ......................................................................................
The Kawakami troupe in Alt Heidelberg a.k.a. New Nations
King from Engei gah (November 1910). Shizuma Kojir as
the prince, Kawakami Otojir as the professor, Kawakami
Sumiko (Otojirs niece) as the waitress. .................................
Matsui Sumako in Alt Heidelberg a.k.a. Remembrances from Peony
Brush, between pp. 88-89. .......................................................
Kawakami Sadayakko in Salom, with Inoue Masao as
Jokanaan, courtesy of Waseda Universitys Tsubouchi Shy
Memorial Theater Museum. ..................................................
Matsui Sumako in Salom, with Kat Seiichi as Jokanaan,
courtesy of Waseda Universitys Tsubouchi Shy Memorial
Theater Museum. ...................................................................
Shkyokusai Tenkatsu in Salom, courtesy of Waseda
Universitys Tsubouchi Shy Memorial Theater Museum. ..
Matsui Sumako in Monna Vanna from Peony Brush, between pp.
128-129. ..................................................................................
Matsui Sumako in A Doll House from Engei gah (October
1911). Matsui Sumako as Nora, Doi Shunsho as her husband
Helmer. In the insert on the upper right, she is dressed in a
manteau, ready to leave the house. ...........................................
Matsui Sumako as Magda in Heimat, dressed in manteau from
Peony Brush, between pp. 34-35. ..............................................
Matsui Sumako as a new woman dressed in manteau from
Peony Brush between pp. 224-225. ...........................................
Kan Hgai, Compassionate Kannon (Hibo Kannon), 1888;
mounted painting, ink and colors on silk, 211.8 85.4 cm;
Museum of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts. A
color plate of this illustration can be found in the color section
on pp. xvii-xxxii. .....................................................................
Kan Hgai, Sketches and drawings for Hibo Kannon, 18841888; hand scroll, (detail), ink and color on paper, 37.5
507.2; Museum of the Tokyo National University of Fine
Arts. .........................................................................................
Murakami Kagaku, Nude Woman (Rafu), 1920; mounted
painting, color on silk, 163.6 109.1 cm; Yamatane Museum. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the
color section on pp. xvii-xxxii. ................................................
Ajanta, cave 1, fresco of Padmapani (Avalokite vara), 6th century. .........................................................................................

xi

232

233
238

246
248
251
252
253
256

256
257
258

269

272

278
280

xii
Figure 9.5.

Figure 9.6.
Figure 9.7.
Figure 9.8.
Figure 9.9.
Figure 9.10.
Figure 9.11.
Figure 9.12.
Figure 9.13.
Figure 9.14.
Figure 9.15.
9.16.
Figure 9.17.
Figure 10.1.
Figure 10.2.
Figure 10.3.
Figure 10.4.

Figure 10.5.
Figure 10.6.

list of figures
Kainosh Tadaoto (1894-1977), Yokogushi, 1918, mounted
painting, color on silk, 164.5 71.4 cm; Hiroshima Prefectural
Museum of Modern Art. A color plate of this illustration can
be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii. ........................
Kainosh Tadaoto, Yokogushi, circa 1916 (?), mounted painting,
colors on silk, 195.0 84.0 cm; Kyoto National Museum of
Modern Art. .............................................................................
Toyohara Kunichika (1835-1900), Scarface Otomi, 1864, woodblock print; Waseda University. ................................................
Kobayashi Eitaku (1843-1890), Woman in Danjur Robe, circa
1885, hanging scroll, colors on silk, 106.0 41.5 cm;
Hakutakuan Collection, Seattle. ...........................................
Natori Shunsen (1886-1960), Onoe Baiko as Otomi, 1917,
woodblock print. ...................................................................
Kainosh, performing as an onnagata in front of a painting,
photograph, ca. 1920. ..........................................................
Leonardo da Vinci (1479-1528), Portrait of Mona Lisa, 15031506, oil on wood, 77.0 53 cm; Muses du Louvre,
Paris. .....................................................................................
Kainosh Tadaoto, Woman of Shimabara (Shimabara no onna),
1920, mounted painting, colors on silk, 69.0 43.0 cm;
private collection. .................................................................
Leonardo da Vinci (1479-1528), St. Anne, Madonna, and Child,
1508-1513, oil on canvas, Muses du Louvre, Paris. ..........
Kainosh Tadaoto, Woman with balloon (Chch), 1926 (destroyed). ..................................................................................
Kainosh Tadaoto, Nude (Rafu), mounted painting, 1926,
colors on silk, 132.0 51.5 cm; National Museum of Modern
Art, Kyoto. ..............................................................................
Kainosh Tadaoto, Singing Geisha Girl (Kagi), 1926, detail of
6 panel screen, 178.5 248.8 cm, colors on silk; private
collection. ..............................................................................
Photograph of a male geisha model. ....................................
Kuroda Seiki, Chsh (Morning toilet), 1893 (destroyed in June
1945), 178.5 98 cm. ..............................................................
Fujishima Takeji (1867-1943), Nihon ni okeru geijutsu no mirai, in
Myj, no. 11, February 1901. ..................................................
Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806): Bathing Beauty (Nyyoku bijin
zu), 1799; 98.5 48.3 cm. Museum of Art, Atami. .................
Georges Bigot (1860-1927), La femme nue de M. Kuroda,
1895; in Fernand Ganesco, Shocking au Japon: de levolution de
lart dans lempire du soleil levant: Dessins de Georges Bigot (np, 1895),
p. 33. ........................................................................................
Watanabe Seitei (1851-1918), title illustration for Lady Butterfly
(Koch) by Yamada Bimy, wood-cut print, 1889; in Kokumin no
tomo, supplement to No. 37, January 1889. ..............................
Machida Shinjir, Rafu, ca. 1890, two-color lithograph; in
Egakareta Meiji Nippon ten jikk iinkai, ed., Egakareta Meiji
NipponSekihanga (ritogurafu) no jidai, vol. 1, Kbe shiritsu
hakubutsukan and Machida shiritsu kokusai hanga bijutsukan
(2002), p. 169. ..........................................................................

284
285
287
288
291
292
293
295
296
299
300
302
303
309
312
317

319
321

324

list of figures
Figure 10. 7.
Figure 10.8.

Figure 10.9.

Figure 10.10.
Figure 10.11.
Figure 10.12.

Figure 10.13.

Figure 10.14.

Figure 11.1.
Figure 11.2.
Figure 11.3.
Figure 11.4.
Figure 11.5.
Figure 11.6.
Figure 11.7.
Figure 11.8.
Figure 11.9.
Figure 11.10.

Kuroda Seiki, Chi Kan J (Wisdom, impression, sentiment), 1897;

180.6 99.8 cm; in Nihon bijutsukan (Tokyo: Shgakukan 1997),
p. 905. ......................................................................................
Nezumiya Denkichi, living doll (iki-ningy) of a peasant
woman, 150 54 34 cm, late 19th century, Smithsonian
Institution; in Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, ed.,
Iki-ningy to Matsumoto Kisabur (Contemporary Art Museum,
Kumamoto and saka History Museum, 2004), p. 65. ..........
Wilhelm Heine (1827-1885), Ein ffentliches Badehaus in
Simoda [sic], in Wilhelm Heine: Reise um die Erde nach Japan:
an Bord der Expeditions-Escadre unter Commodore M. C. Perry in den
Jahren 1853, 1854 und 1855, unternommen im Auftrage der Regierung
der Vereinigten Staaten; mit fnf vom Verfasser nach der Natur aufgenommenen Ansichten in Tondruck, ausgefhrt in Holzschnitt von Eduard
Kretzschmar, vol. 2, (Leipzig: H. Costenoble 1856), p. 34. .........
Yorozu Tetsugor (1885-1927), Higasa no rafu (Female nude
with sun parasol), 1913, oil on canvas, 80.5 53 cm. Museum
of Modern Art Kanagawa. ......................................................
Kainosh Tadaoto (1894-1978), Rafu, 1925; colors on silk, 65
38.6 cm; The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. ....
Inoue Mokuda and Kataoka Toshir, Akadama Port Wine
Poster (1922), HB process offset print, 82 58 cm; courtesy of
Suntory Ltd. A color plate of this illustration can be found in
the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii. ...........................................
Tengu tabako Poster, Iwaya shkai, 1900; multi-colour
lithography, 56.6 43.5 cm; in Egakareta Meiji Nippon, vol. 1, p.
235. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the color
section on pp. xvii-xxxii. ..........................................................
Takashimayas poster promoting the exposition Kimono no saka
1929, deploying the original nihonga painting by Kitano Tsunetomi, Fujin, 1929; colors on silk, 105.8 78.5 cm; courtesy of
Takashimaya Historical Museum. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii. ..........
Fujishima Takeji, Ty-buri (In the Oriental Manner), 1923. .........
Copy after Pisanellos Portrait of Ginevra dEste. .........................
Fujishima at his atelier. .............................................................
Fujishima Takeji, Hkei (Profile of a Woman Holding an Orchid),
1926. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the
color section on pp. xvii-xxxii. .................................................
Fujishima Takeji, a sketch from the catalogue Fujishima Takejiten, p. 212. .................................................................................
Fujishima Takeji, a sketch from the catalogue Fujishima Takejiten, p. 213. .................................................................................
Fujishima Takeji, An Amazon, 1923. .........................................
Kishida Rysei, Portrait of my Sister, Teruko, in Chinese Dress,
1921. ........................................................................................
Mizushima Niou, book illustration from The Mermaids Lament,
1919. ........................................................................................
Mizushima Niou, book illustration from The Mermaids Lament,
1919. ........................................................................................

xiii

325

328

330
332
335

336

340

343
350
351
352
353
356
357
358
359
361
362

xiv
Figure 11.11.
Figure 11.12.
Figure 11.13.
Figure 11.14.
Figure 11.15.
Figure 11.16.
Figure 11.17.
Figure 11.18.
Figure 11.19.
Figure 11.20.
Figure 11.21.
Figure 11.22.
Figure 11.23.
Figure 12.1.
Figure 12.2.
Figure 12.3.
Figure 12.4.

Figure 12.5.
Figure 12.6.

Figure 12.7.
Figure 12.8.
Figure 12.9.

list of figures
Kobayashi Mango, In Front of a Silver Screen, 1925. ...................
Cover picture of Josei, July 1927. .............................................
Cover picture of Josei, December 1927. ..................................
Cover picture, Shinseinen, July 1928. .........................................
Mizushima Niou, book illustration, A Beautiful, New Chinese
Woman, September 1924. .........................................................
Shu Hokush, book illustration, On Chinese Clothes, 1928. ........
Moga in Chinese Dress as Seen Aboard a Train in China, Fujo-kai,
January 1929. ...........................................................................
Kakiuchi Seiyo, At the Crossing, 1930. A color plate of this
illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.
Yasui Star, Portrait of Chin-Jung, 1934. ..................................
Portrait of Mr. Tamamushi. ..........................................................
Miyamoto Sabur, Women in Three Fashion Styles, 1935. A color
plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on
pp. xvii-xxxii. ............................................................................
Okada Saburousuke, Portrait of a Lady, 1936. ...........................
Tsuchida Bakusen, Flat Bed, 1933. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii. .....
Utagawa Kunisada, Tasogare on the veranda, Inaka Genji Nise
Murasaki, vol. 5a (1840). Reproduced from Shin Nihon koten
bungaku taikei 88 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), p. 156. ....
Kuki Shz, The Structure of Iki, from Hiroshi Nara, ed., The
Structure of Detachment, p. 32. ....................................................
Hayashi Yoshikazu and Richard Lane, Kuniyoshi: Hana-goyomi,
Teihon Ukiyo-e Shunga Meisaku Shsei 12 (Tokyo: Kawade
Shob Shinsha, 1996), pp. 44-45. ............................................
Kunisada, The Competitive Type (tate-hiki s) from the series
A Contemporary Thirty-Two Types (Tsei sanjni s), dated 18221823. Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, Philipp Franz
von Siebold Collection. A color plate of this illustration can
be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii. ........................
Yanagawa Shigenobu, Shunshoku Ume-goyomi (1833) Take
Chkichi. Reproduced from Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol.
64 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1962), p. 43. ................................
Kunisada, Shunshoku Hatsune no Ume, 1842. From Chris Uhlenbeck and Margarita Winkel, Japanese Erotic Fantasies: Sexual
Imagery of the Edo Period (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005),
p. 194, plate 74b. ......................................................................
Kuniyoshi, Edo Murasaki Yoshiwara Genji, from Yasuda Yoshiaki,
Edo o Yomu 3: Kuniyoshi (Tokyo: Futami Shob, 1996), pp. 1213. ............................................................................................
Kunisada, Azuma-buri, from Yasuda Yoshitaka, Makura-e no Onna,
Mitsuz no meisaku ehon 3 (Tokyo: Futami Shob, 1989),
pp. 52-53. .................................................................................
Kuniyoshi, Hana-goyomi, Hayashi and Lane, Kuniyoshi: Hanagoyomi, pp. 28-29. ......................................................................

363
364
365
366
368
369
370
371
375
376
378
379
380
388
391
394395

400
402

404
405
406
407

list of figures
Figure 12.10. Kunisada, Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, O-Haru and Mizukichi.
Edo meisaku enpon (Tokyo: Gakken, 1996). A color plate of
this illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xviixxxii. .........................................................................................
Figure 12.11. Kunisada, Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, Chkichi pouring sake. ..
Figure 12.12. Kunisada, Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, Chkichi and O-Sen. .....
Figure 12.13. Kuniyoshi, Edo Murasaki Yoshiwara Genji, Kabuki dressingroom. From Chris Uhlenbeck and Margarita Winkel, Japanese
Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period (Amsterdam:
Hotei Publishing, 2005), p. 207, plate 80b. ..............................
Figure 12.14. Kunisada, Hoshi-tsuki Yo-iri no Shirabe, from Yoshizaki Junji,
Edo shunga: seiai makura-e kenky (Tokyo: Kosumikku shuppan,
2004), p. 159. ...........................................................................
Figure 12.15. Kunisada, Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, O-Kimi and Kinosuke
(Tokyo: Gakken, 1996). A color plate of this illustration can
be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii. ........................

xv

408409
410411
413

414
415
420421

xvi

list of figures

introduction

INTRODUCTION
From the middle of the nineteenth century, society and culture in
China and Japan went through dramatic changes. Western culture,
which up till then had stood at best for the exotic and at worst for
the barbarian, became a force to be reckoned with. While the drive
toward modernization is usually attributed to the aim to assimilate
or even to imitate Western standards, the constraints imposed by the
Western model at the same time demanded a redefinition of cultural
identity for both the Japanese and Chinese. One conspicuous issue
was the concepts of gender and sexuality as signifiers of national
identity. The very conceptual categories of masculinity and femininity from the West were new, and even more so their association with
the state and society. As gender and sexuality constitute societys
innermost core of self-identity and hold a defining power over society, any challenge to the status quo in this realm is keenly felt.
Through the process of political and economic reform in both countries, the concept of a gendered nation began to take on meaning.
As the two countries reacted very differently to modernization,
gender assumed a new symbolic importance. The underlying tension
between the two nations was reflected in their shifting gendered identities, with China now representing the feminine, and it seeing itself
as abject. This extraordinary position complicated Sino-Japanese
relations as both nations competed with each other as well as with
the West. Their cultural articulations reacted to these shifts, and, as
a consequence, they are marked by heightened turbulence and selfconsciousness.
What, then, was the dynamics of this process of model selection,
and of the adjustment to the new world order and power structure?
How was modernity understood through gender and sexuality? How
did these issues enter, and become central to, the making of a new
public culture? Did literature and visual culture in twentieth-century
China and Japan adopt modernism as a means of cultural critique,
or as a reverse orientalism that solidified cultural identity?
This volume brings together a group of scholars that, from a variety of perspectives, attempts to address these issues. The use of gen-

introduction

der as category of cultural analysis proceeds from the well-established

assumption that, in contrast to the biological difference between the
sexes, the social and cultural identity of men and women is culturally
constructed. As Teresa de Lauretis puts it: The representation of
gender is its constructionand in the simplest sense it can be said
that all of Western art and high culture is the engraving of the history of that construction.1 Assuming that nationalism or nation-ness
are, as Benedict Anderson maintains, modern cultural artifacts,
the question becomes what literature, visual arts and mass media
contributed to the alignment of gender to national identity-building.2
In post-colonial societies, but also in semi-colonial nations such as
China and Japan, the relation between gender politics and nationstate building is particularly complex, as the very notion of gender
division developed in reaction to the Western colonial gaze that
conceived of Asia as the cultural Other to European modernity.
Over the past two decades gender studies have become a major
interdisciplinary field both in Chinese and Japanese studies, involving
scholars from Japan, China, as well as the United States and Europe.
This new field of inquiry has brought to Chinese and Japanese studies new methodological as well as ideological challenges. Gender
studies provides new interdisciplinary insights into the reception of
or resistance to Western technologies and arts, and the construction
of native traditions and visions of modernity.
In Japan, early gender studies were based on the feminist movement that since the early twentieth century aimed at the liberation
of women in a male-dominated society. As the French Revolution
(1789) declared the equality of men and women as constituting one
of the fundamental humanitarian maxims that democratic nations
were supposed to take to heart, the Meiji reformers as well as the
intellectual pioneers of Republican China regarded gender equality
in principle as indispensable as the economic and military modernization of their countries. From 1873 onward the reformers around
Fukuzawa Yukichi supported monogamy mainly as a guarantee of
mutual respect between men and women, attacking the old concubine system chiefly for its bad effects on the mental and physical
1
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 3.
2
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. (London, New York: Verso 2003
[1983]), pp. 3-5.

introduction

health of the national subject. The genuinely Confucian ideal of the

good wife, wise mother (rysai kenbo) bolstered the procreative
power of married women and the avowed chastity of their daughters,
but kept the patriarchal hegemony of the family intact. When in
1890 the Meiji Constitution prohibited women from taking part in
political activities, not to speak of suffrage, the unevenness between
male and female social standing became obvious. It was not so much
class consciousness but the contradictory evaluation of the moderately emancipated middle-class housewife and the exploitation of the
female work-force that made Japanese feminists fight for female liberation, especially after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. State
control over sexual mores was not only meant to take the civilizing
example of Victorian morality as a remedy for the seemingly barbarous treatment of women in Edo-period culture, but highlighted the
educational function of the New Woman as token of progress.
Therefore, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Japanese studies of womens history matched the female question to a critique of modernity. While arguing that in Japan the originally matrilineal society
yielded after the twelfth century to the patrimonial norms of feudalism, which in turn prepared for the patriarchal family system and
division of labor in the modern nation-state, the blame for the social
inferiority of women was laid on socio-economic factors. Since the
1980s, however, a new wave of Japan studies has incorporated gender as a category of analysis that investigates the female question
from the perspective of procreation and motherhood, social production, and consumption. The problem with this feminist approach,
however, is that it views the categories of men and women as
givens and not as categories constructed in relationship to each other.
It overlooked the facts involved in specific judgments about femininity and masculinity made by specific people in particular historical
contexts. Within these broad categories, both men and women can
be in the position of powerlessness or of power holders. Once the
question of the mutually contingent nature of gender definitions was
raised, scholarship began to seek a broader understanding of gender
that gave equal attention to the experience of men and women. In
the process, gender studies were redefined as a field encompassing
the study of masculinity as well as femininity. The two approaches
the inequality-patriarchy approach and the gender studies approach
are presently engaged in a dialogue. During the 1990s, feminist

introduction

womens studies shifted to the exploration of the gendered roles of

both men and women in history. Studies on gender demanded an
interdisciplinary investigation of the changes that the adoption of
Western sciences, media and art had imposed on the modernization
of the cultural policy of the nation-state. At present, gender discourse
in Japanese studies encompasses the reception of Western sexology
and medicine, education, commodity industry and the marketing of
mass media, literature, theatre, film and aesthetics that formed the
perception of what was and is experienced as being modern in the
Japanese environment.3
In Chinese studies, the notion of gender likewise has its origin in
early womens studies and in feminism.4 Unlike Japan, however, the
notion of the liberation of women was first brought to national attention in the late nineteenth century as part of the debate on overcoming national weakness. The inferior position of Chinese women was
discussed not in terms of the power dynamics between men and

3
The impact of psychoanalysis and medicine on measures taken against prostitution and homosexuality has been investigated by Sabine Frhstck, Die Politik der
Sexualwissenschaft. Zur Produktion und Popularisierung sexologischen Wissens in Japan 19081941 (Wien: Beitrge zur Japanologie, Band 34, 1997) and Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999). Literary studies were path-breaking in focusing
on the formation of twentieth-century womens literature and concepts of femininity
and masculinity in modern vernacular fiction. See Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet
A. Walker, eds., The Womans Hand: Gender and Theory on Japanese Womens Writing
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Research on canon formation in classical literature is highlighted by a collection
of articles edited by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, Inventing the Classics: Modernity,
National Identity and Japanese Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
In visual culture, one of the first scholars to question the methodology of mainstream art history in Japan was the late Chino Kaori. Her impact on Western scholarship is documented in a collection of essays on Japanese visual culture, edited by
Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, Marybeth Graybill, Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003). Jennifer Robertson,
Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998) and Ayako Kano, Acting like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater,
Gender and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001) have demonstrated how the premodern exclusion of female actors from the stage was to condition the reception of
Western performing arts.
4
For examples in Chinese studies, Marilyn B. Young, ed., Women in China (1973);
Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, ed., Women in Chinese Society (1975); later with
Rubie S. Watson and Patricia B. Ebrey, ed., Marriage and Inequality in China (1994);
Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Space of Their Own: Womens Public Sphere in Transnational
China (1999).

introduction

women but rather in terms of education and literacy. As the argument went, since women held the power in the house and are the
primary educators of children, they are de facto the guardians of the
new China. As the educators of future China, Chinese women must
be given a chance to become educated and must be allowed to have
some degree of participation in the nations public life. This discussion thus framed the issue of womens rights within national politics
as part of Chinas modernization effort. The discussion on the need
to address Chinas gender inequality, furthermore, coincided with
anti-Manchu Republican Movement, ending in the collapse of the
Qing in 1912. Yet, the first self-sacrifice of a woman was in 1907
not for a feminist but for the Republican cause.5 The discussion of
gender and womens rights was from the beginning part of the concern for achieving the modernization of the state, rather than that
of society or its members. Thus in Japan and even more so in Republican China, social and political liberation presented active feminists
with the options of submission to national interests, or utopian, often
anarchist, subversion of the social order.6
In the past decade, the field has grown rapidly and has become
increasingly interdisciplinary, with collaborations between disciplines
such as history, anthropology, literature, political science, sociology,
and economics. In China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, much has been
done on women from a feminist approach in the framework of power
and domination by men in an oligarchic social structure.7 Especially
in China, womens studies are very much part of a political discussion.8 During the last decade, new approaches based even more on
gender issues have begun to emerge. With this new approach, the
field is changing quite dramatically. While the question asked from
the former feminist perspective was how the structure of power is

5
Barbara N. Ramusack and Sharon Sievers, eds. Women in Asia: Restoring Women
to History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 157 ff.
6
Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern
Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983).
7
Major contributions include, for example, Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in
Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1993) and Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, and Tyrene White, eds., Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005).
8
Li Xiaojiang, Xingbie yu Zhongguo [Gender and China] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian,
1994), pp. 2-8.

introduction

reflected in the lives of women and the master text of historical discourse, the new approaches have begun to question the ways that
ideas about femininity and masculinity were reconfigured as well as
re-created in different phases of Chinese history.9
While the essays in this volume deal with various media of cultural
representation, they all analyze the dawn of gender consciousness
and its impact on national and cultural identity-formation in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East Asia. By bringing
together both Chinese and Japanese studies from various disciplines,
this volume hopes to engage in the first critical assessment of the
issues of gendered nation/gendered society within the two countries
as well as of the ways in which their relationship with each other
was articulated during a period of radical internal and external
change between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. The
volume aims to bring forth a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary
comparison of the impact the Western notions of masculinity and
femininity had on China and Japan in their effort toward modernization.
Focusing on the female question, the essays address the following issues: How did the media react to the contradictory role of
women in China and Japan? And how did nationalism enter, and
become central, to the gender policy of art and public media? What
were the dynamics of the cultural process of model selection, and of
its gradual adjustment to the new world order and power structures
in Japan and in China? Still more important, how did the arts and
the media feed into the shaping of the subject and the self-identity
of artists and intellectuals in modernizing Asia? Did literature and
visual culture in twentieth-century China and Japan give voice to
the liberation of women, or did they support the agenda of the masculine power holders in the course of national identity building?
While women occupied in China what Rey Chow called the locus
of social change, how did visual and verbal media interfere with
the new social role of women in the modern nation-state? 10 In what
way did the interaction between the West and Japan, the West and
China, and finally between Japan and China, stimulate the emer9
With Wang Zheng and Christina Gilmartins studies reshaping the literature on
this topic.
10
Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and
East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 39.

introduction

gence of the new or modern definition of gender? What was the role
that media such as painting, illustration, literature and theater played
in creating a pattern of change that later became the new masternarrative for social conformity? How did the visual and performing
arts relate to literary media in transporting the same messages
through different coding processes? While feminist gender studies
take male domination over women for granted, they disagree on the
effects of gender representation on female identity-building.11 Should
we, with Tani Barlow, assume that nationalism came in tandem with
eugenicist body politics that implanted figures and modes of knowledge into the self-image of the modern woman?12 Or, did print industry and mass media in the Japan of the 1920s and 1930s, as Barbara
Sato argues, foster gender consciousness and female emancipation
in the feminist sense of the word?13 How, finally, was modernity
understood through the prism of gender and sexuality?14
Part One deals with the way female gender roles were reconceptualized and redrafted at the turn of the century in China and Japan.
As John Fitzgerald points out, the modern ethic of equality was
not so much directed against inequality as against the much older
Confucian notion of social hierarchy. The ethic of equality between
men and women simply rendered inequality visible. Yet, by using
new constructs of gender relations premised on love, sympathy, and
patriotism, Chinese society managed to override the traditional elite
understanding of social hierarchy without ever naming it. The challenge posed by Western culture and its Japanese translation imposed
on China not only a national crisis but also a crisis of cultural identity
that could not but end in revolution.

11
Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda, ed., Japanese Women: New
Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future (New York: The Feminist Press,
1995).
12
See Tani Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004) on the interference of eugenics, nationalism and female liberation.
13
Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar
Japan (Durham: Duke University Pres, 2003). See Miriam Silverberg, The Modern
Girl as Militant, in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 239-266.
14
Note that none of the essays in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer,
Patricia Yaeger eds., Nationalism & Sexualities (New York & London: Routledge, 1992)
refers to China or Japan.

introduction

As Melanie Tredes study demonstrates, gender was a contested

site already in early Meiji Japan. With the aim of creating the proper
symbols for modern Japan, the state used and changed the image of
the mythical Empress Jing (fourth century) on bank notes and history textbooks according to its differing needs. The juxtaposition of
a heightened masculinity and femininity embodied in the representation of Empress Jing reflects Japan as a civilized modern state
(emphasis on her female features), as an imperial power (emphasis
on her male features), and domesticates her as the faithful wife and
heroic mother for the education of youth.
Joan Judge shows that education for girls and women at the turn
of the twentieth century posed a historic challenge to fundamental
Chinese principles of gender differentiation. The challenge, however,
was not centered on the question of whether or not girls should be
educated, but rather on the public exposure of the female body
through schoolgirls. In Meiji Japan, state control over sexual mores
was not only meant to propagate the civilizing example of Victorian morality against the seemingly barbarous treatment of women
in Edo-period culture, but also amounted to the valuation of procreation over sexual pleasure. In the case of China, the older concept
of ethical boundaries separating men and women was at the forefront
of the debate, instead of the issue of equality, which was new and
was behind the push for womens education.
The way in which literature and poetry organized the metaphor
of masculine self-representation, made it normative, and stored it in
its memory is raised in Part Two by Keith McMahon and Tomi
Suzuki. A closer look at innovative trends in literature shows that in
Japan and China not men but women stood from the late nineteenth
century onward at the center of the literary discourse on nation and
modernity. In Japan, novels written in the vernacular language and
dealing with the psychological drama of illicit romantic love were
serialized in newspapers, journals and magazines from the 1880s.
Initially concerned with the loss of masculine hegemony over women,
starting in the 1910s the literary treatment of male-female relations
was complicated by the notion of psychology and its impact on the
genbun itchi (unification of spoken and written language) movement.
Keith McMahon argues that the transformation of gender relationships in modern China was heralded by a group of novels on
Shanghai courtesans in which these women were portrayed as cun-

introduction

ning and faithless females who had lost all sense of the grand passions
their forbears had for their patrons. Their depiction, McMahon
argues, reflects the disavowed realization that women had made the
first step in modernization and that they had permanently succeeded
in stealing from men the power of the ancient patriarchal order.
Tomi Suzuki analyzes the gender politics and the discourse of the
history of modern Japanese literature, the core of which was constructed in the late 1900s under the influence of Japanese Naturalist
discourse. Following the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 the
so-called Japanese Naturalist writers and critics gained a hegemonic
literary position, supported by the authority of the newly institutionalized genbun-itchi standard of written language. It was also in the first
quarter of the 1900s that fin-de-sicle European modernism with its
subversion of established textual and sexual norms began to inspire
Japanese writers. Realism and modernism developed almost simultaneously and the discourse on modern Japanese literaturewhich
actively contributed to the representations of national identityassimilated, from the beginning of the twentieth century, the discourse
of literary modernism which in Europe emerged as a counter-discourse to bourgeois industrial modernity, taking a feminine position
in opposition to bourgeois masculinity. Literary vernacular language was regarded as either masculinizing women or feminizing
men.
The decisive split between Japanese and Chinese literature
occurred, as Joshua Mostow has pointed out, in the late 1920s, when
in Japan and China alike the dispute about the artists involvement
with reality and his responsibility for creating pure literature
through reproducing truth came to a head.15 In fact, this dispute
was a recycling of the controversy between realism-idealism that
preoccupied art criticism in Meiji Japan. After 1912, in Japan, this
dichotomy resulted in the divorce of art from politics for the sake of
the beautiful nation, a counter-modernist scheme that enhanced
nationalistic self-assurance and imperialist expansion. In China, the
modernist agenda manifested itself in a contrary manner, with the
argument made in 1918 that only the Western notion of self-expres-

15

See Joshua S. Mostow, Modern Literature in East Asia: An Overview, in

Joshua S. Mostow, ed., The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 15.

10

introduction

sion in art represented true engagement with modern aesthetics. The

concern was that in order to be ranked as a civilized nation, China
must necessarily adopt Western movements of modernism in literature as well as in visual media. However, recent literary studies point
convincingly to the politically charged meaning that the self-depreciatory tenor of the Japanese I-novel (shi-shsetsu) attained in Chinese
literature of the 1920s.16 The notion that art should serve the cause
of the nation was only discussed during the late 1930s, when Japan
invaded and occupied parts of China.17
Tze-lan Sang investigates the linkages between women and consumerism in so-called Butterfly novels serialized in Chinese mass
media during the 1920s, especially the theme of the failed Modern
Girl of the urban poor, a class virtually ignored by modernist writers, and stereotyped by leftist writers. Sang looks at popular, commercial fiction as a site of struggle for lower-class women who are
already being interpellated by the modern, but are incapacitated by
class and economics from achieving the state of the Modern Girl,
the symbol par excellence of modernity.
Part Three focuses on the performing arts, starting with Ayako
Kanos thesis on the emergence of the actress and female star after
three-hundred years of all-male performance practice in kabuki and
noh theaters. In her previous path-breaking research, Kano re-examined the emergence of actresses in modern Japan in the context of
nation- and empire-building. Women had been banned from performing in public in Japan from 1629 to 1891, and the appearance
of the first generation of actresses in the 1890s to 1910s coincided
with a number of social, cultural, and political changes in the status
of women in society, the status of theater in the nation, and the status
of Japan in the world. Womens lives were beginning to be ordered
under the good wife, wise mother ideology, theater was beginning
to be regarded as a cultural showcase as well as a pedagogical institu16
Jing Tsu, Perversions of Masculinity: The Masochistic Male Subject in Yu
Dafu, Guo Moruo, and Freud, positions 8/2 (2000); Christopher T. Keaveney, The
Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Societys Reinvention of the Japanese
Shishosetsu (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
17
Cf. Li Chao, Shanghai youhua shi [A history of oil painting in Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1995), pp. 48-49; 95-96; Julia F. Andrews
and Kuiyi Shen, eds., A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of TwentiethCentury China (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998), pp. 172-180,
178-179.

introduction

11

tion for the modern nation-state, while Japan was beginning to grow
into a colonial and imperial power, especially after winning the SinoJapanese War of 1894-1895, and the Russo-Japanese War of
1904-1905. Kanos paper seeks to elucidate how the first generation
of actresses in modern Japan embodied these changes, often in paradoxical and contradictory ways.
Catherine Yeh explores the rise of the female impersonator (dan)
Mei Lanfang in Peking opera. Yeh argues that Mei Lanfang became,
domestically and internationally, the symbol of Republican China.
In the context of the appeals for a strengthening of the manly and
martial spirit among the Chinese, the rise of the dan to national
stardom appears to be a startling contradiction. The rise of the dan
in the early twentieth century came at a moment when Chinas
traditional elite was very much shaken; a profound political transformation was taking place in Chinas relationship to the outside
world, entering a new phase with powerful countries such as Japan
and Russia openly expressing territorial ambitions toward it. The
identity of the country was in flux on all fronts. While the new elites
attempted to evoke a new spirit for the country with concepts largely
borrowed from Western and Japanese nationalisms, Peking opera,
with its traditionally close connections to the court and society,
became a powerful player in the public arena, articulating another
image of the nation. Yehs study traces the complex process in which,
with the help of Japan, the dan rose to this role, in particular through
the literatis transference of their once exclusive and private sentiments for the dan onto the new public forum of the newspaper. She
shows that the built-in ambiguity of the dan character (played exclusively by male actors until the 1920s) lends itself to the interpretation
that during the 1910s and 1920s the strong male public figure had
lost its credibility and moral stature due to the lost wars, the fall of
the dynasty, and the ensuing military strong-man politics. In other
words, the ideal nation as the ideal female became part of a commercial feature in the market place, with the female impersonator
as its ultimate glorification.
Part Four deals with gender representation in diverse genres of
Japans high culture. It is significant that commercially produced
mass media like posters, photography, and film, adapted traditional
subjects to the realism of the new Western representational technologies, whereas politically and culturally restorative high art put the

12

introduction

non-realist traditional aesthetics at the core of cultural essentialism.

The coexistence of the two categories of visualityone in a traditional idiom and the other using Western conventionscan be taken
as paradigmatic of the clash of indigenous and foreign sign systems,
yet Japaneseness was at the heart of both of them.
Jaqueline Berndt focuses on the intersections of high art and
commercial art in representing the (female) nude body. Could the
sexualized female body come to be seen as representing the image
of the nation? How were nudes in high art and advertising charged
with signification that critics and the state would consider national?
The issue of nude and nationalism invites comparison with early
Victorian artistic self-definition as well as with Nazi classicism, but
it also provokes general questions about eroticism and aesthetics.
Through a detail study of the triptych Wisdom Impression Sentiment by
Kuroda Seiki, Berndt is able to show that what made a work of art
national was how it was viewed and treated in the pubic arena
and, in this case, by politicians.
The public construction and representation of the female image
based on national concerns and imperial ideals is studied from a
different angle in Ikeda Shinobus exploration of a series of paintings
from the late 1920s to the 1930s where Japanese painters drew
images of women in Chinese garments. This trend gives rise to the
intriguing question concerning the role of these Chinese female
figures as a subject in Japanese paintings before World War II. Ikeda
reads these paintings as signs of Japans fear of the Other, while
at the same time celebrating the cosmopolitanism of Japans new
empire. By representing China as a beautiful and open female
inviting the gaze of the viewer, the painters attempted to dispel the
sense of fear engendered by the new alien within. In the image of
the female, these paintings both incorporate and subjugate China.
Opposing reactions to Japans modernization drive and nationalist
agenda are presented in Doris Croissants study of the creation of a
modernist National Painting, launched by Kyto Nihonga painters
from 1918 to 1928, and by Joshua S. Mostow in his study on the
aesthetics of bordello chic (iki), a theory of Japanese culture published by the philosopher Kuki Shz in 1930. Both papers deal with
the way society expressed its anxiety regarding its now-normative
gender structures after the establishment of the modern state in
Japan.

introduction

13

On the domestic front, as Croissant shows, Nihonga painters felt

Japan was not going far enough in creating its own modernist school
of national painting. Through an examination of the tension inherent
in the concepts of good and bad womenMadonna and femme
fataleshe brings out the emergence of the sexually dangerous femme
fatale in the Nihonga imaginary. The chapter maintains that Nihonga
paintings of sexually active women reflect the impact of psychopathology and the appropriation of Decadence from Western art.
Through the crossing of genre and gender, a third gender likewise epitomized by the female impersonator (onnagata) in kabuki and
ukiyo-e imageryimprinted itself on the hybrid semantics of the
modern girl.
Joshua S. Mostow argues that Kuki Shzs reaction to the rise
of the modern girl, which the philosopher perceived as a corruption and misrepresentation of the true Japanese spirit, was to construct an entirely new aesthetics of Japaneseness that was founded
on the culture of the unlicensed brothel districts of early nineteenthcentury Edo (modern Tokyo). In other words, the key to traditional
Japanese culture was located both in the body of the Tokugawa-era
prostitute, and in her treatment of and by her male customers. Mostows study explores how the idealized, cross-gender sexuality of the
haori geisha was deployed both in Kuki situating Japan in contrast
to the West and in the eventual mobilization of the Japanese citizenry for the imperialistic ventures of the government throughout
the 1930s on the Asian mainland and in the rest of Asia.
This volume sets out to explore the new dynamism brought to
literature and the fine and performing arts by parallel and conflicting
gender ideals, and the manner in which the historical transformation
of gender representation had an impact on both China and Japan
in a parallel development and a shared experience. It is hoped that
the studies brought together in this volume will help to shape questions for future research on topics such as the following:
*Modernity and the gender politics of media. The media helped to transform the visual recognition of women as icons of cultural identity.
The evidence of the interface between politics and commercial interest is nowhere more apparent than in this case. Female images were
used to translate the new vision of the state as well as the new lifestyle
promoted by the market. The state and the market both used the

14

introduction

medium of the press to create a popular base for their particular

interpretation of the modern and the desirable.
*Woman as metaphor of modernity. It appears that in the drive toward
modernization, Chinese and Japanese society was confronted with
the task of redefining the masculine and the feminine. Women were
at the center of this redefinition, and the task of remaking women
to fit the definition of a modern state became a priority for the men
behind the political reform movements. From the late nineteenth
century onward in China and Japan women figured as virtuous
housewives but also as lascivious modern girls, signifying opposed
facets of modernity and the effects of female sexual liberation on
male self-assertion.
While in Japanese literature and visual arts the New Woman
embodied all the pros and cons of modernization, supporting or
threatening the patriarchal order of society, in China, ironically
enough, the female impersonator rose to a symbol of the unfinished
project to masculinize the Chinese nation. It stands to reason that
the revaluation of traditional arts such as Peking opera and kabuki
helped to link nostalgia for the past to modernity critique. However,
while the rise of the Chinese woman impersonator (dan) was to
underline the moral and aesthetic superiority of Chinese womanhood, it would appear that his Japanese counterpartthe onnagata
retained a transgressive meaning hard to reconcile with the officially
promoted ideal of New Woman. As on the impact of psychology
and medical science gender ambiguity was put on a level with psychic and physical insanity, queer sexualities and transvestism were
in tune with the decadent allure of the onnagata as well as with the
subversive power of the femme fatale.
*The tension between high art and mass media. Constituting the modern
subject between what is the abnormal and the normal, the distinction between high art and low art plays an ambiguous role.
The crisis of the binary opposition of masculinity versus femininity
resulted in the phenomenon of trans-cultural hybridity and cultural/
sexual queerness as evident in the conceptual and visual cross-dressing of the national body in a variety of guises and at a number of
levels. What appears to be one of the striking findings is that gender
cross-dressing occurred in reaction to models of Western sexual,
social, ethnic, philosophical and artistic values. In other words, the

introduction

15

appropriation of Western ways of reading, seeing, and performing

have been paramount to diverse verbal and visual discourses of gender bending and blending, and thus exerted lasting tendencies on
Japan and China even after World War II.

16

introduction

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 17

part one
ENGENDERING THE NATION-STATE

18

john fitzgerald

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 19

EQUALITY, MODERNITY, AND GENDER

IN CHINESE NATIONALISM
John Fitzgerald

1. Introduction
This chapter is about the place of equality in modernity, generally
speaking, and about the way equality entered into orthodox ethics
and everyday life in modern China. It is less concerned with equality as an explicit aim of social, political or cultural movements for
rights, liberation, or esteem than it is with the egalitarian ethic as an
enabling condition for the emergence of the modern national subject
who lays claims to rights, liberation, and esteem. Equality is arguably
a foundational premise of the category woman, for example, and
a condition of her struggle for equal recognition. How and why this
should have come about in China is this chapters primary concern.
The proposition about equality and modernity that is advanced
here is partly grounded in a reading of the original case of Western
modernity, against which the Chinese experience is sometimes measured, and partly grounded in consideration of alternative modernities in Asia that do not always share Chinas preoccupation with
egalitarian ethics to the same degree. For the sake of argument, we
shall assume that identifying what is particular about Chinese modernity calls for particular attention to the extension and intensification
of the ethic of equality in China relative to the original case and
other states in Asia.
One of the challenges in writing a history of Chinese modernity
is to identify when and in what forms egalitarianism came into circulation as an orthodox ethical theory, and how it came to be
embedded in a new social imaginary capable of capturing the imagination, not just of ethical theorists, but of the general run of people.
This did not all happen at once. Following Charles Taylor, we trace
a series of egalitarian redactions dealing with racial equality, sovereign equality, civic equality and social equality which corroded

20

john fitzgerald

the ethical foundations of the pre-modern hierarchical order. While

not suggesting a strict sequence of redactionsfrom racial to civic
to social equality for examplethe chapter highlights exemplary
moments in the extension of the egalitarian ethic and considers when
and how they may have converged in critical ways. Basically, the
chapter sketches some of the phases through which the radical ideas
of a small intellectual elite contributed to a broad social imaginary
of modernity founded on the principle of equality.
A further aim of the chapter is to test some of the implications of
this modernist imaginary for premodern notions of identity, status,
and sentiment. The egalitarian ethic facilitates new kinds of categorical identities (such as women) in place of relational identities (such
as mother or daughter), which in turn imply new forms of representational conventions and institutions. While gender is not central to every point in this analysis, the argument has implications for
the emergence of gender as a significant category of the modern
Chinese state and society.
2. Equality in Original Modernity and Chinese Modernity
Equality sits on the endangered list of political ideals today. 1 On the
one hand it has come to be associated with the discredited policy
idea that communities and states should aspire to achieve equality
of outcomes and on the other has come to be devalued, relative to
freedom and autonomy, in contemporary works of philosophy and
ethics.2 In gender studies, equality is associated with arguments of
first and second generation feminists for equal rights and access
which allegedly paid little regard to differences of class and ethnicity.
The problem of gender equality in China requires closer justification
still. As Tani Barlow has observed, the ideal of equality is in bad
odor among Chinese women activists who prefer to press ethical

1
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
2
The assumption that liberty and equality are competing values has been forcefully challenged by Etienne Balibar and more recently by Ronald Dworkin in Sovereign Virtue. Etienne Balibar, Droits de lhomme et droits de citoyen: La dialectique
moderne de legalit et de la libert, Actuel Marx, 8 (1990). On Balibar see Alex
Callinicos, Equality (Cambridge: Polity 2000), pp. 22-24.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 21

claims more closely attuned to their local needs and particular
desires.3
And yet equality lies at the heart of modernity. In the original
European case, the modern moral order holds that individuals are
fundamentally equal, that social differentiation is ultimately contingent and hence consistent with the fundamental equality of individuals, and that all rights, freedoms and benefits associated with
membership of a consensual community are shared equally by all.
From the seventeenth century, the modern ethic of equality grew in
extent and intensity through a series of what Charles Taylor has
called redactions . . . each richer and more demanding than the
previous one which systematically overwrote the premodern hierarchical order of feudal Europe, starting at the outer reaches of the
kingdom and moving forward to the realm of the city, to the estate,
to the village, and to the last bastion of the hierarchical order, the
family, in the twentieth century. Through these redactions the
obscure theses of religious heretics and sometimes tendentious
hypotheses of ethical philosophers were transformed into a wider
social imaginary of modern life which affirmed the egalitarian ethic
as the only reasonable foundation for moral order.4
This characterization of European modernity might appear to
have little bearing on the history of China or any other society compelled to deal with an expanding Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The course of Western modernity was historically
specific in so far as it can be traced through the desacralization of
the cosmic order in the religious Reformation of the seventeenth
century, to the disenchantment of the natural and political orders in
the scientific revolutions and Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, through to the wider extension of a new moral order that
people came to take for granted in nineteenth-century Europe and
America.5 Western modernity is also historically specific in relation
3
Tani Barlow, Politics and Protocols of Funu: (Un)Making National Woman,
in Christina K Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel and Tyrene White, eds., Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994), pp. 339-359; also Li Xiaojiang, Economic Reform and the Awakening
of Chinese Womens Collective Consciousness, ibid., pp. 360-382.
4
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Public Culture, vol.14, no.1
(2004): 91-124.
5
Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Introduction; See also Callinicos, Equality.

22

john fitzgerald

to foreign imperialism, particularly in the Wests self-representation

as the original source of modernity in contrast to a traditional East
still mired in history. Some would argue that the new moral order
that emerged in the West was not only historically specific but culturally specific as well, particularly in its focus on the autonomous individual and its conception of the individuals relations with society.
Rather than being defined in relation to a pre-ordained cosmic or
natural order, the original modern individual occupies a discursive
space from which it can stand back from the world, reflect upon it,
and do away with external constraints that limit its freedom to reflect
and to act. Along with this conception of the individual comes a
culturally-specific conception of society as something existing for the
mutual benefit of individuals, and a new kind of polity based on the
idea of original consent and popular sovereignty.
In China, to be sure, few of the practices, beliefs and institutions
generally associated with the religious Reformation, the scientific
revolution, or the sacralization of the autonomous individual found
a secure footing at any time in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
That said, the revolutionary principle of equality took root and
spread with astonishing speed through elite discourse and popular
culture. On the one hand, reflections on equality in the late nineteenth century marked out the field of play for a century of ideological, cultural, and political debate about the shape of the people and
the state of China. On the other, the ethic of equality grew in extent
and intensity through a series of redactions peculiar to China that
undermined the foundations of the hierarchical order and forged a
new social imaginary that placed equality at the heart of indigenous
modernity.
The Asian Values school challenged the universal validity of
these original claims and presented an alternative set of culturallyspecific values which included a stress on the community over the
individual, on duties over rights, and on hierarchy over egalitarianism, three features said to be paradigmatic of Asian modernities. 6 At
the time of the Asian values debate there was some sympathy among
official circles in China for the idea that the community took priority

Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries; Joseph A. Camilleri, Regional Human

Rights Dialogue in Asia Pacific: Prospects and Proposals, Pacifica Review, 10.3 (October 1998): 167-185, esp. pp. 170-172.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 23

over the individual and a widespread recognition that duties took
precedence over rights. When, for example, Beijing formally renewed
its commitment to the Human Rights debate through publication of
the official pamphlet Human Rights in China, in 1991, it spelled out a
different understanding and practice of human rights from those
derived elsewhere.7 And yet there was little official or popular sympathy for the notion that hierarchy was preferable to egalitarianism
as a workable foundation for moral order in China. Neither the
Singapore School nor Malaysias Prime Minister Mahathir won
friends on this account. While Chinese commentators were more
than happy to embrace communitarian ethics and to stress the preeminence of duties over rights they were not generally prepared to
concede ground to hierarchy over equality as an organizing principle
of social life.
The history of Chinese as distinct from Western modernity is to
be found in the specific historical contexts and working through of
contradictions between the new egalitarian ethic and premodern
norms of hierarchical order within China itself. What Europe and
America worked to accomplish over three centuries (and have still
incompletely accomplished) was attempted in China over a much
briefer period and to a pattern or sequence of its own making that
bore little relation to Western experience, although owing much to
the terms of its encounter with the West. For this reason we need to
pay attention to the extension and intensification of the revolutionary
idea of equality in China through a series of redactions particular to
the Chinese case.
3. Egalitarian Redactions in China
The ideal of gender equality in twentieth-century China was historically dependent on the emergence of equality as an ideal among
the late imperial elite, and logically conditional on the recognition
that women and men were the kinds of categorical entities to
which equality might well apply. Claims for gender equality made
sense only in a wider moral order where equality was regarded as
an ideal worth striving for. The Qing court first came across the

Camilleri Regional Human Rights Dialogue, pp. 170-172.

24

john fitzgerald

radical notion that perfect equality should prevail among people

in its dealings with European colonial powers.8 Although the notion
that sovereign states are in principle equal was not embraced until
some time after the court signed the first of the Unequal Treaties
(bupingdeng tiaoyue), in the mid-nineteenth century, by the close of the
century it was an accepted principle of Chinas international
relations.9 The ideal of racial equality, on the other hand, was
more readily understood because race was an available concept
(unlike sovereign state) and because racial equality was indirectly encoded in the unequal treaties themselves. 10 The elevation
of women as a category and gender equality as a social ideal
was parasitical on the emergence of national state (guojia) and
national people (minzu) as new categories of moral order, and on
the observation that national equality and racial equality were
ideals worth striving for in the international relations of the
late empire. Paradoxically, the new categories and principles of
egalitarian ethics were encoded clause by clause in the unequal
treaties.
3.1. Racial Equality
Chinas nineteenth-century treaties with Britain established the
equality of sovereign peoples in provisions that allowed for freedom
of movement of British subjects throughout the British empire. Chinese migrs who transited through Hong Kong were entitled to
move as freely as native Englanders through India, Canada, Australasia, Africa, and throughout the British colonies of Southeast Asia.
Britains unequal treaties were premised on the idea that national

The term perfect equality derives from Emmerich de Vattel, The law of nations, or, Principles of the law of nature, applied to the conduct and affairs of nations and sovereigns:
From the French of Monsieur de Vattel [1758]. Joseph Chitty ed., with additional notes by
Edward D. Ingraham (Philadelphia: T.W. Johnson and Co, 1883), clause eight:
Nature has established a perfect equality of rights between independent nations.
For the application of this principle at the Qing court, see James L. Hevia, Making
China Perfectly Equal, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 3, no. 4 (December 1990):
379-400.
9
Dong Wang, Chinas Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2005).
10
Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: Hurst, 1992).

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 25

sovereigns and, by implication, sovereign peoples were fundamentally equal.11
Although notions of racial difference had a venerable history in
China the idea of racial equality was a fairly new one. Ideas of racial
hierarchy, racial honor, and racial degradation were widely conveyed
in popular epithets of the late Ming and early Qing. In the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion gave these terms added currency when rebel propagandists mocked Manchu bannermen as
slaves and portrayed China as being in a condition of enslavement by slaves, a conceit that would become a fairly ubiquitous
feature of nationalist rhetoric at the turn of the century.12 In nineteenth-century China the metaphor of racial slavery was understood
in the hierarchical framework of master-slave relations. The principle
of racial equality came to official attention in the courts dealings with
Chinese subjects living abroad.
Zeng Jize, or the Marquis Tseng as he was known in Europe,
played a crucial and largely unacknowledged role in translating this
new Chinese conception of racial equality into the colloquial idiom
of Europe, North America, and colonial Australasia in the late-nineteenth century. The eldest son of statesman Zeng Guofan, the Marquis was a well-known and highly respected figure in Europe. 13 He
first came to prominence as Minister to Britain for skillfully renegotiating the Chefoo Convention and securing British recognition of
Chinas suzerainty over Burma. As Minister to France he was
reported to have brought down the government by exposing French
duplicity in negotiations over Annam in the London Times. In Russia
he played a key role in recovering border territories under the Treaty
of St. Petersburg. But around the world he was best known for penning an explosive article entitled China, the Sleep and the Awakening which introduced to the Anglophone realm the modernist trope
of the awakening of China. It was also one of the first to argue for

11
See David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
12
Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial
Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 343.
13
Li Enhan, Zeng Jize de waijiao (Taipei: Institute of Modern History); B.L. Putnam Weale (Lennox Simpson), The Re-shaping of the Far East (London: Macmillan,
1905), vol. 1, p. 64.

26

john fitzgerald

treatment of China and its subjects on the principle of racial

equality.14
One of the Marquis Tsengs strongest claims for equality sought
to correct what he termed the outrageous mistreatment of Chinese
living outside China. As an official of the Zongli Yamen the Marquis
was in a position to know. Chinese around the world had been petitioning Peking for years over their treatment at the hands of North
American and Australasian authorities. As an expression of its concern, the Marquis wrote in 1887, the imperial government would
dispatch an official Commission to countries hosting Chinese laborers and merchants with a brief to investigate and report on their
condition. As it happens, the Imperial Commission set sail on its
mission around the time the Marquis article went to press. Its place
in the history of equality can be gauged from the reaction the Commission incited in the colonial territories through which it passed,
including Britains Australian colonies, where the visit was widely
understood in light of the stern warning issued by the Marquis
Tseng.15
Through the 1880s and 1890s, Chinese community leaders in
British colonial territories appealed consistently to the Treaties as
the legal foundation for their demand for equal treatment of Chinese
subjects. When some of the Australian colonies introduced poll taxes
and people-to-tonnage ratios to restrict entry of Chinese immigrants
in the late nineteenth century, Australian Chinese community leaders
petitioned local colonial governors, the Zongli Yamen and the British
Government to redress their grievances. Australian Chinese referred

14
Marquis Tseng, China, the Sleep and the Awakening, The Chinese Recorder and
Missionary Journal, 18.4 (April 1887): 146-153. Richard Horowitz kindly brought this
article to my attention. The piece first appeared in the Asiatic Quarterly Review in
January 1887, and was republished in the London and China News before appearing in
The Chinese Recorder in April. It was also read widely in the USA; The New York Times,
18 February 1887. Also Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ching Period
(1644-1912) (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943),
pp. 746-47.
15
Melbourne Argus, 30 May 1887. Not everyone welcomed the visit. See E.M.
Andrews, Australia and China: The Ambiguous Relationship (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1985), p. 15. In March 1891, at the first National Convention of Australian colonists, Sir Henry Parkes announced in his position as President of the
Convention that the Chinese nation and other Asiatic nationsespecially the Chineseare awakening to all the power which their immense population gives them in
the art of war, in the art of acquisition, ibid., p. 20.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 27

explicitly to clauses of the Treaties signed in Beijing and Tianjin
which established their equality with Australians of British origin.
Among the many petitions forwarded by Australian Chinese colonists
to Imperial Commissioners Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong, was a
representative petition complaining that the restrictions were in
direct violation of all international law and usage, and in contravention of the Treaty engagements entered into by the Governments of
the two Empires.16 Similar appeals were lodged in Beijing in June
1888, when a group of Sydney businessmen led by the flamboyant
tea merchant Quong Tart and representing Chinese residents in
Australasia and New Zealand petitioned an inter-colonial Conference in Sydney. The petition led with an assertion of the legal foundation for equality of treatment for Chinese in the treaties. 17 Far
from being thought unequal, the treaties were read as legal writs
establishing the equality of Chinese with other peoples. No less significantly, the Qing court deferred to the Treaties in following
through on complaints from Chinese subjects abroad about unequal
treatment. And it insisted that the Angell treaty signed with the
United States in November 1880 should not serve as a model for
treaties with Britain and the British colonies.
Under the Angell Treaty, Beijing conceded the right of the Government of the United States [to] regulate, limit, or suspend the
entry or residence of Chinese in the USA. Senior imperial officials
considered the Angell Treaty a dangerous precedent and refused to
extend this clause to existing treaties with Britain for fear that it
would have removed the foundation of their claim for equality of
treatment of Chinese abroad based on the current (unequal) treaties. The Angell Treaty also demonstrated to Chinese communities
outside China that legal treaties offered little defense against racial
discrimination.18 While the Qing court continued to make formal
16
Chinese Imperial Commissioners to the Governor, Oriental Hotel, Melbourne,
13 June 1887. P.87/1869. Enclosure.
17
To the Honorable the Representatives of the Australasian Colonies, meeting
in Conference upon the Chinese Question in Sydney, June, 1888. Petition presented
by Quong Tart and others.
18
Andrews, Australia and China, pp. 24 ff; Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race,
Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998), pp. 212-16. On Chinese responses to Britains attempts to follow the Angell
Treaty see Correspondence to Zongli Yamen from Li Hongzhang, Minister in
charge of Chinas coastal provinces of Liaoning, Hebei and Shandong, requesting

28

john fitzgerald

approaches to the British government to intervene on behalf of Chinese in British colonies it could no longer intercede as readily on
behalf of Chinese in America after the signing of the Angell Treaty.
Chinese community leaders around the world then began to appeal
in their petitions to Peking to ideals of natural justice as well as to
Britains existing treaty obligations. This was a significant moment
in the development of Chinese egalitarian thinking. By the 1880s
Chinese community leaders were appealing to a modern ethical principle of human equality that could not be abrogated in any court of
law. Pleas for recognition of human equality were read by clerks and
higher officials of the Zongli Yamen in the 1880s, forwarded with
recommendations for action to Chinas minister in Beijing and colonial authorities in London, and filed away in the Yamens growing
archive of racial grievance and national humiliation for a later
day.19
3.2. Sovereign State Equality
The idea of the perfect equality of national states entered Chinese
imperial diplomacy after prompting from Japan rather than from
Chinese communities abroad. At the time the unequal treaties
were being drafted from the 1840s through the 1870s, the notion
that state-to-state treaties should be based on the principle of sovereign equality seems to have troubled few of the Chinese officials who
negotiated them. Once the court commissioned translations of seminal works on the law of nations, however, the equality of sovereign
states under international law became available in translation to a
small cohort of officials and diplomats.20 This was a relatively late

negotiations on reduction of the tonnage allowance for ships carrying Chinese going
to Australia (seventh day of seventh month of Guangxu 14 [1889]). First National
Archives, Beijing.
19
Article translated by Tongwen Publishing House on Australias Harsh Treatment of Chinese (twenty-seventh day of eighth month of Guangxu 14 [1889]). First
National Archives, Beijing; Report to Zongli Yamen from Chinese Merchants Lei
Dehong et al., regarding exorbitant taxes imposed on Chinese in Australia (first day
of seventh month of Guangxu 14 [1889]). First National Archives, Beijing; Correspondence from Kuang Qizhao to the Zongli Yamen Regarding the Report by Chinese Merchants of Harsh Treatment in Australia (nineteenth day of eighth month of
Guangxu 14 [1889]). First National Archives, Beijing.
20
Hungdah Chiu, The Development of Chinese International Law Terms and
the Problem of their Translation into English, in Jerome Alan Cohen, ed., Contem-

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 29

development. Even the Marquis Tseng, writing in 1887, showed
little recognition of the equality of states when he argued for equality of treatment of Chinese abroad. Although arguing for equality of
treatment for Chinese people he nevertheless recommended that the
treaties should be revised to secure recognition of Chinas suzerainty
over neighboring states.
Meiji statesmen appreciated the significance of sovereign equality
under international law some years before their counterparts in the
Qing court. Xue Fucheng, secretary to statesmen Zeng Guofan and
Li Hongzhang, closely observed Japanese negotiations with the US
over the recovery of customs rights from 1876 to 1879. Drawing on
this observation, Xue wrote in 1880 that the treaties imposed on
China by the English and French are at variance with international
law (gongfa).21 According to the historian Zhang Jianhua, this was
possibly the first occasion on which a Chinese official acknowledged
that the treaties violated an accepted code of international law. The
Marquis Tseng made a similar observation around the same time,
also drawing on Japanese sources. Within weeks of taking up his
appointment as Qing Minister to the Court of St. James, in March
1879, Zeng Jize learned of Japanese attempts to renegotiate the
countrys treaties with America and Europe from conversations with
representatives of the Japanese mission in London. Deriving his sense
of what was fair and just from an elementary understanding of the
force of international law, the younger Zeng condemned the treaties
unfair aspects (bu gong zhi chu).22 The principle of international law,

porary Chinese Law: Research Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
21
The term gongfa was selected for international law in the first published translation of the subject in the mid-nineteenth century. Henry Wheatons Elements of International Law was translated by WAP Martin and published in 1864 under the title
Wanguo gongfa (Public law of the myriad states). The precedent held until the early
twentieth century. Theodore Wooleys Introduction to the Study of International Law, for
example, was translated as Gongfa bianlan [General law outline] in 1877. The term
was displaced by a Japanese neologism guojifa from around 1907. Chiu, The Development of Chinese International Law Terms, pp. 140, 143, 146.
22
Zhang Jianhua, Ershi shiji zhongguo dui bupingdeng tiaoyue gainian de qishi [Origins of the concept of the Unequal Treaties in twentieth-century China],
paper presented to the Joint Conference of the History Department of Peking University and the Historical Society for Twentieth Century China, Peking University,
15-17 June 2001, in Niu Daoyong, ed., Ershi shiji de zhongguo [Twentieth century
China] (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chuban she, 2003).

30

john fitzgerald

which the treaties appeared to violate, was that of fairness among

states. Fairness need not, however, imply equality.
The Marquis reading of the nineteenth-century treaties invites
reflection on how these treaties came to be remembered as unequal
in the twentieth century. The Marquis certainly believed the treaties
to be unfair and he indicated that the imperial government
intended to repeal them on the expiry of the present decennial
period. These were bold claims. Still he neglected to mention sovereign equality or to prefix the word treaties with the word
unequal. In fact the treaties offered a warrant for the claim that
people of Chinese descent should be treated equally alongside others.
Race could not be used as a principle of exclusion within the bounds
of the British empire. The treaties came to be recognized as unequal
through a second redaction of the hierarchical order, the substitution
of a modern notion of sovereign equality among national states in
place of the prevailing concept of imperial suzerainty.
The idea of sovereign equality was one of the better-kept secrets
of European negotiators. The treaties introduced China to a law of
nations allegedly founded on the principle of equality of national
sovereignty but largely effected through wars and punitive reparations cemented in treaties. That said, the equality of sovereign states
needed to be understood and acknowledged in China before the
prefix unequal could be applied to the treaties. This happened
only in the twentieth century. In 1906, a student of politics and law
at Tokyo Law College, Hu Hanmin, published a landmark series on
international law in the Chinese revolutionary journal Minbao (Peoples journal). In the second installment of the series, Hu introduced
the concept of the right of state equality (guojia pingdengquan). He
also acknowledged an underlying contradiction between equality of
national sovereignty, as a principle at law, and the requirement on
states to assert their equality in practice by arms and diplomacy.
Some states were clearly more equal than others. Relations among
states are not [to be] promoted or retarded on the basis of the
strength or weakness of a country, he explained. But when a strong
country is dealing with a weak one, or the strength and status of
countries are unevenly matched, there is little prospect that they will
enter into treaties on an equal footing.23 Circulation of the term
23
Hu Hanmin, Paiwai yu guojifa [Anti-foreignism and international law], published serially in Minbao [Peoples journal], nos. 4, 6-10 & 13 (1906).

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 31

Unequal Treaties in the early-twentieth century signaled a growing
recognition among Chinas political elite that equality was a fundamental principle in relations among states.
The term Unequal Treaties is believed to have first appeared
in the transcript of a speech by Sun Yatsen which was transcribed
and published by Wang Jingwei in the same issue of Minbao in which
Hu Hanmin wrote of national equality. The Manchu Government,
Sun was reported to have said, entered into all kinds of unequal
treaties (bupingdeng zhi tiaoyue) with various countries. 24 This claim
signaled the formal arrival of the principle that relations among sovereign states should be based on the principle of equality. Still, the
term Unequal Treaties failed to enter wider currency for another
decade after Sun Yatsen first coined the expression. He employed
the term once more in 1907. The phrase appears to have disappeared for over a decade before coming back into circulation around
the time of the May Fourth Movement in 1918 or 1919a movement that signaled the arrival of a new egalitarian social imaginary
on a broader cultural front.25
3.3. Categorical Equality
Striking notions of racial equality and sovereign equality that emerged
from the empires relations with the colonial powers might have had
little impact on Chinas domestic social hierarchies were it not that
the very ideas of nation and race implied that new kinds of primordial categories were at work in human affairs. It was not long before
Chinese elites were claiming that the perfect equality of sovereign
nations implied a perfect equality of sovereign citizens. The equality
of citizens in turn challenged the utility of older relational categories
such as husband and wife and ruler and subject in the organization and management of public life. It started making sense to speak
of citizens and women rather than of subjects and wives as categories
of ethical reflection.
The writings of Tang Caichang and his circle illustrate the connections linking ideas of racial and sovereign equality, on the one
hand, and equality at home among new categories of people includ24

[Wang] Jingwei, Bo geming keyi zhao guafen shuo [Refuting the claim that
revolution will lead to partition], Minbao, no. 6 (1906).
25
Zhang Jianhua Ershi shiji zhongguo.

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john fitzgerald

ing citizens, social classes, and men and women. Around the time of
the 1898 reforms at court Tang and a number of Hunanese friends
founded the Society for the Study of Public Law (gongfa xuehui) in
Changsha. In announcing the Societys foundation, Tang acclaimed
the efforts of Japanese officials in reclaiming national sovereignty for
Japan. Unlike China, Tang recorded, over the last few years each
of the Great Powers has revised its treaty [with Japan], to convert it
to a statute of equality (pingdeng).26 In the same year Tang and his
group specifically addressed the problem of human categories (rendeng) in one of the earliest writings on categorical equality, an
extended essay entitled Egalitarianism (Pingdengshuo).
The essay began with an explicit reference to the problem of classification in egalitarian and hierarchical ethics: Egalitarianism
means to establish equality in accordance with heavens endowed
categories.27 The question at issue was not equality itself but rather
what, precisely, nature intended to be equal by virtue of the primordial categories inscribed in nature itself. Nature offered no ground
for the existing set of hierarchical classifications, the essay continued.
Only in the Confucian canon were mechanisms contrived to classify
people as gentleman and minister, father and son, husband and
wife, elder brother and younger brother, official and people, scholar
and artisan, merchant and farmer, wealthy and poor, honorable and
mean, superior and inferior. These relational classifications were
falsely based on analogies with the natural world for although heaven
had established hierarchies in nature it did not bestow hierarchical
classifications or hierarchical relations on human society. Confucian
hierarchies were a corruption of the original and natural human
condition occasioned by greed and vanity. The single category
endorsed by nature was the universal category of people (ren). The
human species was an irreducible classification.28

26
Gongfa xuehui xu [Preface to Society for the Study of Public Law], Xiangbao,
no. 43 (nd). See also Li Yumin and Li Bin, Wuxu shiqi weixinpai dui pingdeng
tiaoyue de renshi [Recognition of the Unequal Treaties among the reform faction
in 1898], Hunan shifan daxue shehuikexue xuebao [Journal of the School of Social Sciences of Hunan Normal University], no. 2 (1999).
27
Shan hua pi jia you, [Tang Caichang], Pingdeng shuo [Egalitarianism], Xiangbao [Hunan journal], no. 58 (nd): 229; no. 59 (nd): 233; no. 60 (nd, c. 1898): 237.
Emphasis added.
28
Pingdeng shuo, Xiangbao, no. 58: 229.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 33

The radicals anticipated the arguments of their critics.29 Some
might claim that equality has no place in the natural order of things,
they conceded, and that just as the week is divided into ten days,
so people are ranked into ten classifications. Family and state would
be equally threatened if equality were to apply to customary family
relationships. If father and son were equal then familial love would
be too slight. If husband and wife were equal what distinction would
be retained between strength and mercy? And if elder and younger
brothers were equal there would be no sequence between age and
youth . . . If equality is implemented among families, then families
will be ruined. Significantly, a similar line of reasoning applied to
states: If equality is implemented among states, then states will be
destroyed (guowang). Never has it been heard of any benefit deriving
from a theory of equality.30
Rigid hierarchical classifications within families and among states,
the essay continued, were inconsistent with Western philosophy and
practice. The West had developed three key concepts of individual
autonomy (renren zizhuquan), neighborly love, and the unity of rulers
and people (jun min yiti) which infused their countries with strength
and vitality. These Western principles were consistent with alternative religious and philosophical traditions long neglected in China.
All great religious traditions offered basically the same idea under
different names: the Buddhist idea of equality derived from the Mencian idea of mutual love, as did the Western ideas of individual
autonomy and loving your neighbor as yourself. All great religions
also tended toward the principle of equality.31
Although paying deference to the West, Egalitarianism was one
of a number of tracts that drew on elements of the canon to mount
a case for universal equality sanctioned by varieties of classical learning. Through the closing decades of the 19th century arguments for
equality were generally presented as radical exegeses of classical
learning. In presenting his case for universal equality, for example,
Kang Youwei employed a vocabulary and syntax in One World Phi29
On the conservative reaction to egalitarian claims see Peter G. Zarrow, Fear
and Loathing: Anti-Egalitarianism in the Late Qing, paper presented to panel on
Equality and Its Discontents in Late Qing China, AAS Annual Meeting, San Francisco, April 2006.
30
Pingdeng Shuo, Xiangbao, no. 59 (nd): 233-234.
31
Pingdeng Shuo, Xiangbao, no. 59 (nd): 233-234.

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john fitzgerald

losophy (Datongshu) that would have been familiar to any scholar preparing to sit the imperial examinations. Kang merged the Confucian
principle of human-heartedness (ren) with a Buddhist ideal of undifferentiated compassion and a Mohist concept of universal love (jianai;
boai) to promote the ideal of universal equality.32 In a similar work
on the merits of the Confucian principle of human-heartedness (ren),
Tan Sitong fused the Confucian Book of Rites (Liji) with Edward Bellamys Looking Backward into a utopian vision of a world without
classifications, no boundaries, wars, suspicion, jealousy, powerstruggles, or distinction between the self and others; then equality
would finally emerge.33 Kang and Tan pushed the limits of classical
learning by reconfiguring key concepts of the Confucian canon, stripping them of their hierarchical implications, and re-presenting them
as evidence for the new theory of equality.
The theory of equality began to take root outside Confucian discourse around the turn of the century, sometimes in unexpected
places. In mid-1901, Tang Caichangs brother Tang Caizhi was
invited to Australia to edit Liang Qichaos party newspaper in Sydney, the Tung Wah Times (Donghua shibao). Earlier in the same year,
Liang himself presented a series of weekly lectures in the upstairs
reading rooms of the Tung Wah Times building in downtown Sydney
on the problems presented by Confucian forms of hierarchy under
the empire, and on the need to recast person-to-person relations and
Chinas system of territorial government on the new principle of
equality. The talks were later published in Japan under the title
Tracing the Source of Chinas Weakness (Zhongguo jiruo suyuanlun).34
These published lectures are among the earliest of modern writings
on the egalitarian episteme that refuse to defer to canonical Chinese
works in philosophy and religion. Liang selected instead the Taiping
32
On Kang Youweis early essays on this theme, see Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890-1911 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 29-30, 46-48.
33
Tan Sitong, An Exposition of Benevolence: The Jen-Hseh of Tan Ssu-tung. Chan Sinwai, trans. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984), pp. 215-216; also Edward
Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967
[1888]).
34
Liang Qichao, Zhongguo jiruo suyuanlun [Tracing the source of Chinas
weakness], in Liang Qichao, Yinbingshi wenji [Collected essays from the Ice-Drinkers
Studio] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1928 [1900]), vol. 2. An imminent publication on the theme of the lectures is noted in the Sydney Tungwah News (Donghua
shibao) on 13 March 1901.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 35

motif of a people enslaved by slaves, and he developed this motif
into a systemic critique of the problem of hierarchy in Chinese politics, society and culture.
Local Chinese-Australian observers were familiar with the idea
of racial inequality and observed from afar the submission of the
Chinese empire to the Great Powers. As noted, they had long been
petitioning for redress under the treaties. A supportive ChineseAustralian editor in Sydney introduced Liang to Australian readers
with the comment that China would prosper in a matter of decades
if only its people would unite and sacrifice themselves for the nation,
as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao suggest . . . Who would then
fear being enslaved by others?35 But Liang carried a different message about problems of equality within the Chinese empire itself. Of
greater concern than Chinas enslavement by others was the ubiquitous pattern of hierarchical subservience that Liang detected within
the empire. He painted a bleak picture of hierarchical master-slave
relations in the family, in relations linking families with their communities, in relations between subject and ruler under the empire,
and in relations within the administrative structures of the territorial
state itself. Liang situated the problem of hierarchy in relational
networks of obligations that strangled Chinese patriotism. A country, he said, [should be] founded on equality.
Historically the chief enemy of equality was an imperial court
that treated its national citizens as personal slaves. The emperor
was supported by a Confucian education system which facilitated
the work of the court by cultivating slavishness (nuxing). The best
and brightest of the empires scholars vied for entry to slave schools
and had the nerve to count their success in the imperial examinations an honor rather than a disgrace. On securing appointment to
the imperial bureaucracy they entered into an administrative system
of entrenched servility. No institutional relationship in the empire,
from the imperial family to the patriarchal household, escaped the
model of a master-slave relationship.
In contrast to the West, Liang insisted, Chinas hierarchical ethics
conspired to deny the people of China their heaven-endowed
human rights (tianfu zhi renquan). Liang pictured the West as an
arcadian site in which equality reigned supreme. Echoing Tang
35

Tungwah News, 16 January 1901.

36

john fitzgerald

Caichang and Tan Sitong, he remarked that Westerners look upon

their countries as the common property of rulers (jun) and people
(min).36 After touring Melbourne and Sydney he announced that no
person or government in Western societies could humiliate another
or be bullied without inviting resistance in the name of equality. 37
In contrast to China, Western schools and public institutions promoted equality and autonomy (he was not familiar with the great
traditions of public-school bullying). All children, rich or poor, male
or female, he said, were taught from an early age to govern their
own selves (zizhi qishen).38 The source of Western strength lay in the
ubiquity of the principle of equality as it applied to cultural, social,
civil and political relations as well as relations among states. The
source of Chinas weakness lay in its cultural, intellectual and institutional reproduction of master-slave relationships from the family
to the school to the county to the imperial court.39
Back in China, meanwhile, writers began to frame their arguments against hierarchy in a borrowed language of anarchism and
socialism.40 Equality was to be the ruling principle of the age. But
through what categories should it apply? Anarchists and socialists
were equally hostile to patriarchal relational identities in the family
and the state. But where anarchists imagined the end of hierarchy
as the effacement of particularity in relationships, socialists and later
communists translated particularity from a sign of relational identities to one of categorical classes. The anarchist Cai Yuanpei, for
example, depicted a world populated by people without qualities in
one of his short stories. Not only were there no classifications for the
hierarchical identities of ruler and minister, husband and wife, older
36

Liang Zhongguo jiruo suyuanlun, pp. 16-17.

At this time Liang does not appear to have noted (or registered) the systematic
humiliation and bullying of indigenous Australians. After returning to Japan, however, he launched a scathing attack on White Australia for humiliating people of
Chinese descent. See John Fitzgerald, The Slave Who Would be Equal: The Significance of Liang Qichaos Australian Writings, in K.L. So, John Fitzgerald,
Huang Jianli and James K. Chin, eds., Power and Identity in the Chinese World Order:
Festschrift in Honour of Professor Wang Gungwu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2003), pp. 353-373, esp. pp. 370-373.
38
Liang, Zhongguo jiruo suyuanlun, pp. 17-22.
39
Fitzgerald, The Slave Who Would be Equal.
40
Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) and Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
37

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 37

and younger brother, or parent and child, nor were there any categorical identities of ethnicity or gender. Every person was identified by number.41 For socialists, on the other hand, the relational
classifications of the Confucian hierarchy made way for larger horizontal categories of class, nation, and gender in the belief that if
equality was to be the ruling principle of the age then these were
the categories to which it should apply
4. Category and Equality
Early theorists of equality retained a concern for relational roles such
as husband and wife, or younger brother and elder brother, and
argued for equality within these relational associations. Anarchosocialists argued for the abolition of social classification entirely. Neither strategy meets the needs of the modern social imaginary that
requires classificatory schema to do its work; that is, to define exactly
who is equal to whom, or not equal as the case may be. In contrast
to hierarchical ethics, the egalitarian ethic favours categorical identities over relational onescategories such as race, nation, citizen,
men, women, peasants and proletarians over relations of ruler and
minister or husband and wife. Needless to say relational hierarchies
such as these do not disappear from everyday life just because they
are devalued as categories of ethical thought. Whether she is ethically
subordinate or technically equal to her spouse, a wife is a wife. But
the category wife has little ethical salience when wife and husband
are considered equal subjects because they happen to be men and
women. As the equality of a wife is grounded in her identity as a
woman so woman takes priority over wife as the appropriate female
marker for ethical reflection.
In assigning value to people, hierarchical and egalitarian ethics
operate as systems of classification as well as systems of rank. Classes
or categories (deng) are specified before they are arranged hierarchically (dengji) or equally (pingdeng). The kinds of categories specified for
equal or hierarchical treatment are not however interchangeable.
41
Cited in Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, p. 68. Cais story New Years
Dream (1904) appeared twenty years before Zamyatins better known novel, We, in
which all characters are identified by number. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by
Bernard Guerney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 [1924]).

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john fitzgerald

Hierarchical complementarity and egalitarianism operate through

different classificatory regimes, hierarchy typically drawing on flexible relational classifications that prescribe superior and inferior roles
in a given relationship (husband/wife), and equality operating around
broad categorical classifications that ascribe certain characteristics
to whole categories of people (men/women).42 The two ethical systems assign relative value to categories of people but, more importantly, they specify and construct the categories of people to be
ranked in distinctive ways.
Naoki Sakai suggests how such a procedure may have worked in
Japan. The idealization of the equal and autonomous subject in Meiji
nationalism implied new kinds of social relations built on essentializing categorical identities in contrast to the flexible relational identities enshrined in the Confucian order. Where relational identities
linked the individual to the social whole through kinship or fictivekinship mediation, nationalism in Japan called for specific or categorical identities that ruptured relational identities of kinship and
rank in order to create egalitarian bonds with fellow countrymen.
A new comprehension of individual identity, founded on categorical
identities rather than on shifting relational identities, was considered
a prior condition for the installation of the nation state in
Japan.43
For a hierarchical system to be undermined, the categories through
which it operates have to be discredited and displaced by a system
of classification more amenable to equality of treatment. In Japan,
nationalists early formed the view that the hierarchical ethics of Confucianism were incompatible with the vision they held for their country. Meiji nationalists such as Fukuzawa Yukichi identified
Confucianism with hierarchical social relations, indeed credited it
with little apart from hierarchy, and ignored alternative interpretations of Confucianism that made allowance for faith and doctrine in
42
The term hierarchical complementarity is borrowed from Taylor, Modern
Social Imaginaries.
43
Naoki Sakai, From Relational Identity to Specific Identity: Reflections on the
Nationalist Ethics of Fukuzawa Yukichi, in Sechin Y.S. Chien and John Fitzgerald,
eds., The Dignity of Nations: Equality, Competition and Honor in East Asian Nationalism,
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). On the general principles at work
see Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1997); also
Craig Calhoun, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Cambridge, MA and Oxford:
Blackwells, 1994), pp. 9-37, 304-336.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 39

addition to hierarchical ordering of social life. They certainly underestimated the flexibility of the Confucian canon for re-inscription as
an egalitarian ethical systema capacity more fully explored in
China by Kang Youwei and Tan Sitong.44 For early theorists of
nationalism in Japan, the options facing the country appeared confined to status relations based on civic equality, under nationalism,
or relations based on hierarchical complementarity under Confucianism. As far as Fukuzawa Yukichi was concerned, Confucian ethics
had to be repudiated for the idea of the nation to take root in Japan.
The problem with Confucianism was not that it was old, or traditional, or Chinese, or even Asian, but that it obscured the categorical
identities that made the nation possible. The simplistic reduction of
Confucianism to hierarchical ethics explains the readiness with which
egalitarian ethics were taken up in elite reform circles in Japan.
In China, also, equality entered into the ethical repertoire of
modernity as the antithesis of a finely articulated Confucian respect
for hierarchy. In this case the crude reduction of Confucianism to
little more than a hierarchical code can be traced to the appeal of
egalitarian ethics outside the orthodox canon. The contemporary
word for equality, pingdeng, had a long pedigree in Buddhist scripture
and commentary. Storytellers of the Song Dynasty recounted folkloric tales of bureaucratic bullies and greenwood heroes, and diaries
and memoirs of the late imperial period illustrated sentimental relations based on mutual regard. More recently still, equality was an
axiom of the mid-nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion. There
being fields, let all cultivate them; there being food, let all eat; there
being clothes, let all be dressed; there being money, let all use it, so
that nowhere does inequality exist . . ., ran one Taiping proclamation.45 The prominence of equality in the heterodox world of the late
empire reinforced an impression that there was little space for equal44
On faith and doctrine in Confucian thought, see Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and
Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1978).
On egalitarian Confucianism see Kang Youwei, Datong Shu [One world philosophy]
(Shanghai: np, 1935) and Kang Youwei, Ta Tung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of
Kang Yu-wei, Laurence G. Thompson, trans. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958); Tan
Sitong, An Exposition of Benevolence.
45
Cited in R. Keith Schoppa, The Columbia Guide to Modern Chinese History (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 271-273. Compare the Revolutionary
Alliance manifesto of 1895: The good fortune of civilization is to be shared equally
by all the people of the nation. Cited in ibid., pp. 278-279

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john fitzgerald

ity in the orthodox Confucian repository. So modern nationalists

tended to repudiate the Confucian legacy on the ground that it
favored hierarchy over equality as the sovereign virtue of public
life.
As a rule, once relational hierarchies are dismantled new hierarchies come into view among the categories of race, class, and gender.
These are rarely entirely new. In the high empire, for example, a
restricted range of categorical identities was ascribed to certain
classes of productive labor. But the imperial style of categorical classification did not imply equivalence or equality among each of the
categories. Indeed a hierarchy of value was conveyed in the classical
sequence of scholar, farmer, artisan and merchant. This sequence
implied a hierarchical complementarity of orders working for the
benefit of an organic whole in which each order was assigned its
place.
In a similar style, men and women were categorically distinguished
in the classical saying men delve and women spin (nan geng nu zhi).
Francesca Bray remarks that this maxim invokes a gender division
of labor in which women and men were thought of as equally productive members of society.46 Contrasting this maxim with the values enshrined in the prevailing normative hierarchy of the late
empire, Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson note that the expression
suggests the equivalence of male and female work rather than a
strict hierarchical structure.47 If so, the maxim hints at residual tension between the egalitarian nuance of categorical identities (man
and woman) and the normative hierarchy of relational identities
(husband and wife) within the classical canon.
Women and men are more readily addressed as equal categories when other classifications of class and caste are introduced into
the conversation. Crossing the two categories of women and literati,
for example, creates an overlapping space for expanded participation
in public life by elite women. Alternatively, by playing on the equivalence of men and women at work, the idea of gendered labor sum46
Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 183.
47
Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, Axes of Gender: Divisions of Labor and
Spatial Separation, in Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion:
Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005), Introduction.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 41

mons the absent specter of those who do not labor at all, a social
elite whose station in life places them above working men and
women. Inequalities of class or caste can in this way render men
and women equal at a defined status level. In China, the status
associated with education preserved distinctions of rank and status
among literati themselves to the point where initial attempts to
expand the scale of political participation reinforced the status of the
gentleman and gentlewoman.
In English history, something along these lines is implied in the
popular anthem of the fourteenth-century peasant revolt that began
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
In China, however, the equivalence of men and women conveyed
in the epithet men delve and women spin implied little about the
equivalence of commoners and gentlemen. The closing question of
the English rhyme, who was then the gentleman, is missing from the
Chinese saying. We should not read too much into this distinction
as one was associated with a peasant revolt and the other with notions
of Confucian domesticity. Nevertheless modern English and Chinese
egalitarians had recourse to different mythical repertoires in which
to ground their claims for gender equality, and the language in which
they framed their claims differed accordingly.
Both historicized their claims. Adam and Eve were cited by Watt
Tylers peasants in the fourteenth century, and again by Oliver
Cromwells Ironsides in the seventeenth century, because Adam and
Eve were thought to have labored together at the original moment
in history when human belief and custom took god-given forms not
yet corrupted through greed and envy into the code of the gentleman. Similar implications were drawn in late-nineteetnth-century
China by radical thinkers who historicized their own society in relation to a primeval state of equality. To return to Egalitarianism: There
was no human world (ren shijie) in those days, nor were people classified into different kinds. But as the days passed and the world grew
more opulent, people flourished along with their possessions. At this
point they divided themselves into classes . . . and were then classified according to their status (fen), strength (zheng), and the differences
that divided them. Among the nominated differences of status
and strength were fathers, scholars, wives, and daughters. 48
48

Pingdeng shuo, Xiangbao, no. 58 (nd): 229.

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john fitzgerald

The space for making claims on behalf of gender equality

expanded in the late imperial period when the pool of educated men
spilled over the rim of the imperial bureaucracy into a larger and
potentially-active social elite that aspired to power. In the Qing
Dynasty a number of literati figures tested the boundaries of constitutional thought, as Philip Kuhn has noted, defining that part of
the community that properly participates in national politics by
advocating more intensive political engagement of the literati. 49
Their justification for expanded participation bore little relation to
the twentieth-century call for participation by equal citizens in the
public life of the nation. In the nineteenth century, expanded political participation was sanctioned by a conventional sense of political
vocation on the part of educated literati who aspired to enlarge the
scope of elite responsibility within the formal administration of
empire. Nonetheless, in broaching the issue of constitutional inclusion in the polity, reforming literati also carved out space within the
elite for educated women to challenge their own exclusion.
Once the privileged status of the bureaucratic elite was undermined by literati seeking wider participation in the constitutional
body, claims by elite women for inclusion in the polity could be
accommodated in orthodox constitutional debate. Not being men,
of course, they confronted an obstacle to inclusion that male literati
happily avoided. Rebecca Karl notes that male literati could claim
the right of participation by virtue of being men who were groomed
in classical learning, and hence sanctioned for office by tradition,
but that elite women needed to prove their fitness for politics by
showing not only that they were educated but that their gender did
not render them unfit for office. Breeding and education, it was
argued, outweighed gender as a condition for participation. Further,
if education and grooming were primary conditions for participation,
then educated elite women were better-qualified for inclusion than
the majority of ignorant and uneducated men. Elite women distinguished themselves from the nationalist categories of women and
peoplegenerally represented as servile, ignorant and unfit for
participationby ranking themselves alongside elite men as active

49
Philip A Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 27-28

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 43

agents of Chinas political and social transformation.50 The claim for
expanded political participation was mounted not on the republican
assumption that all people are equal but simply on the premise
that gender should present no barrier to inclusion in an expanded
elite body politic. Once the idea that all people are equal had been
embraced as the foundational principle of public life, however, the
scale of political inclusion and the scope of state power were both
open to radical reconfiguration beyond the class of gentlemen and
gentlewomen. The category woman became the category everywoman.
5. Equality, Gender, and the Power of Representation
One notion from original modernity that was readily translated into
the Chinese idiom was the notion that the unfolding of history
reflected the workings of efficient causation (a clash of interests)
rather than an ideal harmonization of meanings between the secular
and sacred worlds.51 In retrospect, nothing more clearly marks twentieth-century Chinas rupture with its imperial past than the permeation of the idea that categorical identities work through representative
politics to secure categorical interests, and that they drive historical
development in the process. Less obviously, perhaps, the idea of
categorical interests helped to transform the social imaginary from
one based on hierarchical complementarity to a modern imaginary
based on equal relations, in which categorical interests vied for
supremacy through the struggles undertaken by their representatives.52
50

Rebecca E. Karl, Slavery, Citizenship and Gender in Late Qing Chinas

Global Context, in Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898
Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in late Qing China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Asia Center), pp. 212-244, esp. pp. 238-239.
51
Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries.
52
According to one reading of equality, the equal consideration of interests is
the only plausible rendering of the claim that all people are equal. In light of overwhelming evidence that people are not equally endowed by nature, culture, or inheritance, the claim that people are equal would be merely formulaic if people could
not lay claim to be treated equally by other people or by those in authority. Hardheaded egalitarians who find egalitarian rhetoric and ritual empty of content argue
that equality is far more than formulaic when it extends to equal consideration of
peoples different interests. Stanley I. Benn, Egalitarianism and the Equal Consideration of Interests, in Louis P. Pojman, and Robert Westmoreland, eds., Equality:

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john fitzgerald

The egalitarian principle came to mean different things from

empire to Republic because it was bound up with the larger transition from manifest power to representative forms of authority. The
ambivalent place of equality in the imperial court is delightfully illustrated in James Hevias study of the adaptations in court ritual undertaken to meet the requirement of the Boxer Protocols. Henceforth
relations between China and the Western powers were to be based
on the principle of perfect equality set out by Emmerich de Vattel
in his Law of Nations (1758). Thus the Final Protocol of the Boxer
treaty dealt with ceremonial audiences between the Chinese emperor
and representatives of foreign states: . . . the ceremonial adopted
by China as regards Foreign Representatives shall, in no case, be
different from that which results from perfect equality between the
countries concerned, and without any loss of prestige on one side or
the other. This Article was understood and enacted by the Empress
Dowager in the literal sense of extending an equal welcome to any
and every foreigner who found their way into the inner halls of the
Forbidden City. All foreigners were foreign representatives because
the sample foreigner stood for the whole. Thus perfect equality was
taken to mean, on the Chinese side, serving tea to delegation wives,
offering sweets to foreign children, and meting out hospitality to
well-connected tourists who happened to stumble into the imperial
chambers. The Dowagers actions annoyed the British foreign-service
officers who drafted the Boxer articles. The appeal to perfect equality was intended to cover merely the representatives of foreign
sovereignsin effect to elevate the status of sovereign representatives
above that of wives, children and tourists. The court understood
equality to apply to the embodied foreigner.53
Similar notions about the embodiment of equal sovereignty in the
newly-sovereign people seem to have circulated widely in the early
months of the Republic. At the outbreak of the revolution everyone
who was anyone sought inclusion among the people. Bandit gangs
re-branded themselves Peoples Armies (minjun), categories of people
hitherto excluded from political participation (especially women)
struggled for formal recognition, and imperial officials from the

Selected Readings (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997), pp. 112119.
53
Cited in Hevia, Making China Perfectly Equal, p. 388.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 45

rank of provincial governors-general to the county magistrate reinvented themselves as the peoples officials without invitation or
sanction from the new Republican state. There seems to have been
continuing confusion about the relationship between embodied sovereignty and representative government for some decades after the
1911 revolution. Popular sovereignty itself, Kenneth Pomeranz has
suggested, was readily understood and accepted in the Chine republic because the idea that the realm belonged to the people was
widely invoked in the literature and statecraft of the later imperial
era.54 But the idea that the newly-sovereign people should alienate
their sovereignty to representative leaders and institutions took some
time coming, and only then at the cost of further revolution. The
history of the Nationalist and Communist revolutions of the 1920s
and 1940s can plausibly be read as the progressive imposition of
representative forms of sovereign government on a people still experimenting with manifest forms of sovereign power. The awakened
Nationalist functionary and the scientific Communist exercised
sovereignty on behalf of categories of sovereign people who were to
be constituted as categories not by their own behavior but by those
who represented them.
Beginning with the Nationalist Revolution of the 1920s the categories of gender, nation and class were imagined as bearers of particular interests that others (their representatives) could pursue on
their behalf. In cases where members of a category had not yet
awakened to their categorical identity, and hence failed to recognize
or to pursue their interests, institutions were set up to awaken the
category, ascribe its interests, and represent them in the meantime. If a category was awake to itself but still failed to recognize
its ascribed interests, then the preferences that it mistakenly expressed
as interests were derided as wants or desires (yaoqiu) in contrast
to the needs (xuyao) their representatives recognized on their behalf.
Needs equated to interests, desires to passions. Needless to say, the
needs of a category took priority over its desires in the eyes of those
who represented it in the arms of the state.

54

Kenneth Pomeranz, Ritual Imitation and Political Identity in North China:

The Late Imperial Legacy and the Chinese National State Revisited, Twentieth Century China, 23.1 (November 1997): 1-30, esp. p. 8.

46

john fitzgerald

The Maoist revolution of the 1940s went a step further, seeking

to convert needs into desires through artistic and institutional representations sponsored by the party. This was consistent with the
classical Leninist distinction between the conscious or rational vanguard and the unconscious proletariat in scientific socialism. The
calculation and ascription of interests is typically undertaken with a
cool head in the light of day; there is no place for desire or passion
except in so far as these can be harnessed to the service of hardheaded interest. Indeed the function of interest in modernity, Charles
Taylor remarks, is to control and check passion.55 So Mao Zedong
distinguished between the wishes (desires) and the needs (interests) of Chinas masses: In working for the masses, Mao advised
in 1944, we must start from their needs. This was only the starting
point. It sometimes happens that the masses objectively need some
reform but are not yet subjectively awakened to it and willing or determined to bring it into effect. In such cases the Party had its work
cut out ensuring the great majority of the masses have become
awakened to the need and hence willing to pursue it. The creation
of the category women required that all women should awaken to
the category and embrace it as their own. The state helped to constitute the category, women, by converting the needs of women
into self-willed desires.56
In the Peoples Republic, categorical interests came to be represented through social institutions. Institutions representing categorical identitieslabor unions, peasant associations, womens
associations, youth organizations, and the likemobilized members
of their categories to participate in institutional life and pursue their
interests through representational forums. Institutions of this kind
for women in fact predated the founding of the Peoples Republic.
The work of the Womens Bureau of the Chinese Nationalist Party
in the 1920s, or that of the Working Womens Congress of the Communist Jiangxi Soviet in the 1930s, was in each case directed toward
encouraging women to pursue their interests through representa55
Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 104. Taylor draws on Albert
Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
56
Mao Zedong, Let Us Transform the Consciousness of the Masses, in Stuart
R. Schram, ed., The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, revised and enlarged edition
(Harmondwsorth: Penguin, 1969), p. 318.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 47

tive forums. Before the founding of the Peoples Republic individual
women could presumably pick and choose among the institutions
that represented their interests. These options were foreclosed after
1949 by ensuring that no categorical institution was available to
women outside of the state-sponsored Womens Federation (fulian).
The role of the Womens Federation, Tani Barlow points out, was
to ensure that women could not be represented as women without
the agency and mediation of Fulian. Even so, Barlow observes, the
women (funu) so represented, appeared never to have understood
what was meant by womens self-interest until propagandists
explained the stakes in concrete detail.57 The role of literature and
the arts was to explain how the categorical interests of women (and
of workers, peasants, the People) emerged from the representations
made on their behalf by agencies of the party-state.
In sum, when the egalitarian ethics of the late Qing and early
Republic established all people as equal citizens they invited people
to embrace new kinds of categorical identities that could be construed as equal. Where ethics and etiquette explained conduct in
relational identities, the conduct of categorical identities such as
women was best explained by reference to the kinds of interests they
pursued as members of the category woman. Thus the idea of
interest entered the vocabulary of Chinese modernity as an indicator
of the self-aware category (women) and only then as something that
individual people might possess as disaggregated members of a particular category (a woman). When the attribution of interests established priorities among categories (nation above women) the authority
to calculate and ascribe interests to categories became the highest
authority of allthe authority of the sovereign republican state. In
the modern era this sovereign authority is exercised through the
mechanics of representation in statecraft, literature, and the arts.
6. Egalitarian Sentiment and May Fourth
Revisionist studies of late imperial China have highlighted the role
of sentiment in undermining the ascriptive hierarchies of the old
empire. Similar arguments about the role of sentimental literature
57
Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 57-59.

48

john fitzgerald

in critiquing aristocratic society have been made in the historical

ethnography of Western modernity.58 But what kinds of feelings are
appropriate for asserting categorical identities based on the principle
of equality? In the Chinese Republic, love and sympathy were put
forward in literature and art as the affective foundations for equal
relationships.
In the New Culture Movement, egalitarian critiques of the impropriety of patriarchal family relations were vulnerable to the counterclaim that patriarchal bonds were based upon deep-seated family
sentiments sanctioned by heaven. No hot-blooded daughter or son
of the New Culture movement could deny the force of feelings. They
could however challenge their mothers and fathers claim that their
children were defying a pre-ordained order of feeling by proposing
a different order of feeling founded on the spontaneous ordering of
equal relationships. Hence New Culture activists confessed to feelings
that were sincere and spontaneous, Lee Haiyan observes, in contrast
to the suffocating sentiments of the traditional family, and they professed egalitarian ties of sympathy with unknown strangers in place
of graduated ties of family sentiment. They launched a withering
attack on the hypocrisy and insincerity of family sentiment
within the patriarchal order in order to promote alternative sentimental structures of sympathy, romantic love and patriotism. Accusations of insincerity were made plausible by attributing authenticity
to feeling and at the same time essentializing Confucian ethics as a
hierarchicalor more specifically patriarchalsystem that operated
to crush spontaneous feelings. In the form of sympathy, sentiment
escaped the bonds of hierarchical relations and reached out to
embrace all members of the national community. The people of
China were entitled to feel sympathy for fellow humans but they
were to be expected to feel sympathy for fellow nationals as a precondition of nationhood.59
Lee Haiyan has tested some of the insights into the new structure
of feeling conveyed in the New Literature. The mission of the new
58
Martin W. Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the
Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995); Haiyan
Lee, Love or Lust? The Sentimental Self in Honglou meng, Chinese Literature: Essays,
Articles, Reviews, no. 19 (December 1997); Reddy, The Invisible Code, p. 3.
59
Lee Haiyan, Sympathy, Hypocrisy, and the Trauma of Chineseness, Modern
Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 16, no. 2 (Fall 2004).

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 49

literature, she remarks, was to make Chinese feel for and identify
with one another as co-nationals by replacing kinship and localitybased identities with universal, sentiment-based identities.60 Young
people who awoke to their equality, autonomy, and freedom were
represented in the new literature as isolated from kin and locality
and pining for a soul-mate who could share their feelings. Love
meant never having to say you were lonely. Thus stories of unrequited love intensified representations of anomie while stories of
romantic love dispelled them. The role of romance in this mission
was to highlight ruptures in the inherited order of feeling, brought
on by severing ties of kin and locality, in order to demonstrate the
healing powers of love and sympathy, and finally to police the boundaries of affection around categorical identities of nation, class, and
gender.
The convergence of category, interest, sentiment and representation in the social imaginary of modern China had far-reaching consequences for the gendering of art and life. As we have noted, the
material interests of a category are rarely reckoned equivalent to its
unmediated desires. But an exception may be made when a category
is, by dint of nature, capable of distancing its rational self from its
passions sufficiently to calculate its objective needs. This is not the
case with women. In the literature and art of the Republican era
women regularly fail the test of rationality.
A number of historians have noted the disparity between a republican conviction that women were entitled to recognition of their
personhood (renge) and the widespread observation that actual women
rarely displayed the independence of character indicated by personhood.61 Bryna Goodman goes further to argue that the figure of the
modern woman, on close interrogation, was found incapable of
exercising the faculty of reason. In popular literature of the 1920s,
modern women were portrayed as far too interested in gold, diamonds, and other luxuries to merit recognition as true equals of

60

Lee, Sympathy, Hypocrisy, and the Trauma of Chineseness, p. 2.

See for example Wendy Larson, Women and Writing in Modern China (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998); Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral
and Textual Historiest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Barlow, The
Question of Women in Chinese Feminism.
61

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john fitzgerald

men.62 Serious and disinterested attention to the affairs of the world

was expected of both men and women. But, Goodman observes,
women appeared to lack a serious worldview because they were
more susceptible than men to desires. Men, by contrast, act with
cool rationality. Whether they are peasants, workers, landlords, intellectuals, or petty-bourgeois capitalists, men act rationally in pursuit
of their interests while women merely desire.63 One outcome of the
pairing of rationality and desire was the gendering of the social
imaginary of modern China by disaggregating the categories of citizen and People into desiring women and rational men.
7. Concluding Remarks
As an ideology, nationalism translates the principle of equality among
sovereign states into claims for the equality of categorical identities
within national states. The nationalist equation of the people of a
territorial state with an historical nation challenges the status of the
old elite by making a categorical elite, a nation, out of the common
people.64 Once the nation is established as a fundamental category
of social life it serves as a model for other kinds of categorical identities that undermine the relational hierarchies of the premodern
order. Hence one of the features of the age of nationalism has been
an extended confrontation between the ethics of hierarchical complementarity and of categorical equality. The extension of modern
nationalism, to quote Liah Greenfeld, is driven above all by preoc62

Bryna Goodman, The Vocational Woman and the Elusiveness of Personhood in Early Republican China, in Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds.,
Gender in Motion.
63
Zha Mengci, Nuzi jiaoyu de quexian [Defects in womens education], Zhonghua xinbao, 16 September 1922. Cited in Bryna Goodman, The Vocational Woman
and the Elusiveness of Personhood. See also Bryna Goodman, Unvirtuous Exchanges: Women and the Corruptions of the Shanghai Stock Market in the Early
Republican Era, in Mechtild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski, eds., Women in China:
The Republican Period in Historical Perspective. Berliner China-Studien, no. 44 (2005).
Bryna Goodman, The New Woman Commits Suicide: Gender, Cultural Memory
and the New Republic, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 64, no. 1 (February 2005). Another role for women in literature and art has been to illustrate the tragic outcomes
of the venal pursuit of self-interest on the part of men. See Goodman, The New
Woman Commits Suicide.
64
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), pp. 3-10.

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 51

cupation with status.65 In broad historical terms, nationalism introduces a new ethic of equality that challenges the legitimacy of
existing status hierarchies. It undermines ascriptive hierarchies of kin
and nobility and substitutes categorical hierarchies arranged around
nation, race, class and gender. Rather than simply replace hierarchy,
nationalism reassigns hierarchy to categorical relationships consistent
with the practices of national states.
In China, the decline of the hierarchical ideal was hesitant and
uneven, pushed along by wars and treaties, encouraged by emigration and immigration, accelerated by domestic social movements,
and celebrated in the art of the novel, drama, painting, film, and
song. Elite conversations that took place in late-nineteenth-century
China on racial equality under the bilateral treaties or on the subject
of sovereign equality among national states anticipated deeper redactions that overwrote the ethical categories of the Confucian canon
and the hierarchical character of the imperial state. The impact of
these redactions in the name of equality came together in a new
social imaginary midway through the first decade of the Republic at
the time of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements.
In retrospect, the New Culture Movement appears to have been
significant not for this or that pioneering achievement in the history
of Chinese modernity but for crystallizing earlier achievements
around a new social imaginary. Recent scholarship has established
beyond question that many of the ethical, political, literary, and
artistic patents that once were lodged on behalf of May Fourth activists can in truth be traced to earlier discoveries and precedents of
men and women literati who were active in the late Qing.66 A similar
claim could be made for the phrase Unequal Treaties which,
although a distinctive May Fourth expression, was initially coined in
1906. The achievement of May Fourth was to entice back into circulation key ideas, motifs, genres and life-styles that were intermittently pioneered over several decades but largely lost to sight (or to
one another) over the period of late-imperial reform and Republican
revolution. The May Fourth Movement harnessed ethical and cul65

Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 488. See also Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory
(Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwells, 1995), and Social Theory and the Politics of
Identity.
66
David Der-wei Wang, Fin de Siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities in Late Qing Fiction 1849-1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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john fitzgerald

tural preoccupations with equality to patriotic concern for Chinas

equal treatment at Versailles. At this point a halting series of redactions against the egalitarian order converged around an unassailable
motif of egalitarian modernity embracing race, nation, age, gender,
and class equality. In the New Culture Movement the egalitarian
ethic entered into common sense among young mobile urban Chinese as a sensible way of apprehending the world.
For the modern woman, the brawl over classifications was only
partially resolved when categorical identities won out over relational
ones. The pre-political question what is a woman? had to be
resolved as a condition of political participation. As Tani Barlow has
shown, the national category woman was occupied by a variety of
signifiers in China over the course of the twentieth century, including
funu, nuxing and nuren. Each carried particular implications for identity
politics and strategies, and some were implicated more than others
in the ideological strategies of revolutionary state discourse. All three
terms may be casually deployed in everyday language but their strategic utility in identity politics has been finely honed by the respective
positions they have defined relative to state and social power in modern China.67
This ambivalence is unavoidable. The kinds of categorical identities that develop in association with liberation movements are essentializing and repressive and yet instrumental in enabling the
liberating ethic of equality to confront the repressive ethics of
hierarchy in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.68 The modern
ideal of equality has been generally compromised in China through
its long association with the official language of state.69 On this point
67

Tani Barlow observes that by the 1980s the term funu had degenerated into a
dated ideological strategy of Maoist state discourse. Although its pedigree reached
back before the founding of the Communist Party to the liberation politics of the
May Fourth period, the deployment of funu into the post-Mao era signified continuing Communist Party colonization of the reformist and revolutionary legacies of the
womens movement. By the late 1980s women seeking to contest the Partys hold
over their lives often eschewed the term funu in characterizing their positions and
opted instead for nuxing (female) or nuren (woman as social science category). See
Barlow, Politics and Protocols of Funu.
68
Craig Calhoun, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, esp. p. 26; Harrison White, Identity and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
69
Among the sources consulted for Tani Barlows study, Li Xiaojiang has written
that womens liberation can no longer be attained by pursuing equality between
men and women. In Peoples China, Li argues, gender equality implies assimilation

equality, modernity, and gender in chinese nationalism 53

China is not alone. Nevertheless the struggle for recognition of status
equality continues to catalyze social and political movements to the
present day on the assumption that all human beings are created
equal and deserved to be recognized as equals. Precisely what equality is taken to mean in a given political community may well be
controversial but the underlying principle of the irreducible equality
of citizens remains, in Ronald Dworkins phrase, a sovereign virtue
of public life.70
There is little evidence to suggest that women propose to abandon
earlier struggles colonized by the statethe right to name themselves, to seek liberation, and to pursue equality, freedom, and autonomydespite the familiar terms for women, liberation, and
equality being tainted through association with the official rhetoric
of state. There may be some disquiet over the semiotic rules of
engagement for women in China today but the struggle continues
using alternative idioms of gendered justice. Similarly, there is every
likelihood this struggle will be reflected outside of China in Western
works on Chinese historical studies.
Mechtilde Leutner for example has highlighted the failure of
mainstream histories of modern China to take gender seriously.
The time has come to bridge the gap between gender/womens
studies and mainstream studies in Republican historical studies by
showing much more concretely than we have in the past the male
bias of the theories and paradigms used in mainstream studies. 71
The point is well made. In Leutners account, however, employing
gender as an analytical category means challenging grand narra-

into an originally male world with the result that women make an effort to use
male standards (so called society standards) to judge themselves. The pursuit of
equality in this assimilatory sense leads to unequal outcomes in the allocation of time
and the distribution of labor. In so far as the equitable distribution of time and labor
remains an important goal for actual women the ideal of equality has not been abandoned. Nevertheless the official code of equality is eschewed because it institutionalizes inequalities that impact on the lives of actual women. The official code of
equality is also thought to retards the wider womens struggle for freedom and autonomy. Li Xiaojiang, Economic Reform and the Awakening of Chinese Womens
Collective Consciousness, pp. 377-378.
70
Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, esp. Chapter 4.
71
Mechtilde Leutner, Womens, Gender, and Mainstream Studies on Republican China: Problems in Theory and Research, in Mechtilde Leutner and Nicola
Spakowski, eds., Women in China, pp. 57-85, 67.

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john fitzgerald

tives and at the same time having an emancipatory intent and

being anti-hegemonic and opposing dominant attitudes with respect
to political and social questions as well.72 In fact emancipation narratives are the grandest modern narratives of all; it is no simple thing
to escape them with emancipatory intent. Perhaps the challenge for
gendering mainstream histories might be put another way. The challenge for historians of modern China is to interrogate the emancipation narrative itself and with it the categories through which it
operatesincluding gender, class, race and nation. Gender as an
analytical category is not easily distinguished from gender as a
constitutive category of the emancipated nation. For the same reason, the history of the category woman is inseparable from the
cultural history of the emancipation narrativeor the awakeningof
modern China.
In China the emancipation narrative has long revolved around
an ideal of equal status relations to be realized through an act of
liberation from unequal status relations. The indigenous symbol of
Chinas Liberation in 1949 was not a torch of liberty. It was and
remains the specter of a people who have stood up in Mao Zedongs
famous conceit. Our nation, Mao declared in Beijing in 1949, will
never again be humiliated by others. We have stood up.73 Chinas
national emancipation promised recognition for the slave who felt
despised by others. 74 Women featured prominently among the categories of slaves who attained their liberation in 1949, alongside
workers, peasants, and youth. The liberation of the modern woman
at once constituted her as a category of the modern nation and
enabled her to claim rights and esteem as an equal citizen. This
marks the beginning of her struggle.

72

Leutner, p. 69.
Mao Zedong, Zhongguo renmin zhanqilaile [The Chinese people have
stood up], in Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected works of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin
chubanshe, 1977), vol. 5, pp. 3-7.
74
On recognition, see G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. A.V. Miller, trans.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 104-119 (IV: 166-196) and Charles Taylor,
Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
73

representing meiji japan

55

BANKNOTE DESIGN AS A BATTLEFIELD OF GENDER

POLITICS AND NATIONAL REPRESENTATION IN
MEIJI JAPAN
Melanie Trede

This chapter focuses on the Japanese governments efforts to visualize the mythical Empress Jing as a representation of the new nationstate in the 1870s and 1880s.1 As modern as they were supposed to
look, the symbols and proxies of nation-states throughout the world
in the nineteenth century were more often than not rooted in legends
and myths, historical narratives and heroes of the past. In the wake
of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers The Invention of Tradition
and Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities (both 1983), the visual
mythmaking of national histories in nineteenth-century art has
become the focus of several important publications.2 But much still
needs to be done regarding the use and definition of gender in the
process of selecting national heroes for modern objectives in East
Asia.
I come to this topic via my interest in pre-modern pictorial narratives and their visual and textual reception within gendered as well
as socially and politically defined contexts. My approach is informed
by this type of social art history; in this chapter I also employ an
1
I am grateful to Gakushin University (2003) and Kajima bijutsu zaidan (2005)
for financial support for this project and I thank the following individuals for their
encouragement and valuable suggestions: Kobayashi Tadashi and Nakamachi
Keiko; Doris Croissant, Ikeda Shinobu, Joshua Mostow, Jaqueline Berndt and other
members of the Gender Symposium in Heidelberg (October 2004); Timon
Screech, Toshio Watanabe, John Carpenter and the audience at a lecture I delivered
in April 2005 on the topic for the Japan Research Centre Seminar Series, School of
Oriental and African Studies, London University.
2
Among them is Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and
Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2001). A comprehensive digest of images and discussion of them is included in
Monika Flacke, ed., Mythen der Nationen: Ein Europisches Panorama (Berlin: Deutsches
Historisches Museum, 1998). This exhibition catalogue explores the visual tools employed by seventeen European nations and the United States in constructing a
national, unified past. East Asian and other nations visual self-representations as
well as gender questions remain unaddressed in this catalogue.

56

melanie trede

ethnological methodology that incorporates a cross-section of elite

and popular cultural products for public consumption, most notably
the design of banknotes.
To start with my conclusion: Empress Jing served as an ideal
proxy for not only Meiji Japan at large but for both the Meiji
Emperor and, in another reading, for the Meiji Empress. How was
this possible? This female deityempress/queen, mother of the deity
of war, cross-dressing female warrior, and successful invader of the
Korean kingdomswas imbued with rich layers of textual, visual,
and ritual significance for all strata of Japanese culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Meiji government counted on
the shared knowledge of these multiple facets of Jing, and it saturated
the newly constructed, hybrid images of this imagined figure with
varying implicit modern objectives. The process of choosing Jing
as representative of the early Meiji state on banknotes, bonds and
stamps, and adapting her imaginary portrait to suit the ideologies of
a Westernizing, modernizing and ultimately colonizing nation-state
is best defined as a palimpsest. Although the term palimpsest was
originally a term associated with medieval manuscripts and has
recently been most commonly used in the field of literary studies, 3 it
adapts itself perfectly to the phenomenon examined in this chapter.
The Meiji images under investigation here show Jing as a western
Amazon, an allegorical figure, and in a bust portraitall of which
seem to defy previously known concepts and perceptions of Jings
multifaceted persona. Her oscillating gender in previous texts and
pictures was compelled to yield to a clearcut gender definition as
stipulated by the Meiji government in its wide-ranging attempt to
emulate Western culture. However, as we shall see, the Jing images
preceding the Meiji era continued to live on in a variety of media
that included votive tablets, school textbooks and paintings. They
shaped the reading of those hyper-texts of official attempts to recast
her in partly Western, partly Japanese guises and thus helped create
a modern understanding of a shared Japanese past. This process of
overwriting is by no means unique to the creation of Jing imagery
in the Meiji era, but applies to other images in both Japan and elsewhere, as will be discussed below.
3
Grard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littrature au second degree (Paris: ditions du Seuil,
1982).

representing meiji japan

57

When the Italian engraver Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898)4 designed the first ever portrait of a woman to adorn the one-yen Japanese banknote in 1881, he and his advisors made a number of
decisions regarding the gendered identity and symbolic significance
of the image (Figure. 2.1). Chiossone was one of many foreigners
hired by the Meiji government to introduce new technologies. He
worked for the Japanese Finance Ministry between 1875 and 1891
in Tokyo, and then chose to stay on in Japan, where he collected
Japanese artifacts and remained until his death.
The front side of the note shows an imaginary portrait of Empress
Jing, thought to have ruled in the third century CE. The professor of Japanese art and literature at Tokyo University, Kurokawa
Mayori (1829-1906), offered his expertise for the design of the portrait.5 Jing is shown with the hybrid facial features of a Western/
Japanese woman, with long black hair, dark eyes, and an outfit that
successfully blurs her identity while yet still alluding to her prehistoric
persona.6 An undefined garment covers her shoulders, the commashaped beads magatama indicating archaic rulership, but they can also
be read as Western jewelry. The portrait is framed by an oval-shaped
medallion much employed in the European movement to generate
symbols of national unity, and reminiscent of classical Roman and
nineteenth-century neo-classical portraits of emperors, rulers and
heroes. Adding to the decorative elements, the oval-shaped frame
includes reiterations of her name, Jing Kg, Empress Jing (literally divine success).
Chiossones Jing portrait of 1881 was reprinted as a five-yen note
in 1882 and as a ten-yen note in 1883 (Figures. 2.2 and 2.3), thus
4

On Chiossones role within the Print Bureau, see kurash Insatsukyoku, ed.,
kurash insatsukyoku hyakunenshi [One hundred years of the Finance Ministrys Print
Bureau] (Tokyo: Insatsukyoku chykai, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 461-469. For more comprehensive studies on Chiossone, see Meiji Bijutsu Gakkai, ed., Kiyossne kenky: oyatoi
gaikokujin [Studies on Chiossone: A foreign employee] (Tokyo: Ch kron bijutsu
shuppan, 1999).
5
Hibata Sekko, Nihon ybin kitte shiron [Historical studies of Japanese postage
stamps] (Tokyo: Nihon yken kurabu, 1930), p. 109. I am grateful to Tanabe Ryta, curator of the Postage Stamp Museum (Kitte no hakubutsukan) in Tokyo, for
providing xeroxes of this rare book.
6
The catalogue of the Banknote and Postage Stamp Museum states that the
portrait appeared more Western than Japanese. See Fukunaga Yoshio, ed., Zuroku:
Osatsu to kitte no hakubutsukan: Catalogue of the Banknote & Postage Stamp Museum (Tokyo:
kurash insatsukyoku kinenkan, 1996), p. 19.

Figure 2.1. One-yen banknote, designed and engraved by Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898), 7.7 13.1 cm, 1881; Banknote
and Postage Stamp Museum, Tokyo.

58
melanie trede

representing meiji japan

59

Figure 2.2. One-yen, five-yen and ten-yen banknotes, designed and engraved by
Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898), 1881, 1882, and 1883, respectively; Banknote and
Postage Stamp Museum, Tokyo.

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Figure 2.3. Detail of ten-yen banknote, designed and engraved by Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898), 9.3 15.9 cm, 1883; Banknote and Postage Stamp Museum,
Tokyo. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp.
xvii-xxxii.

representing meiji japan

61

marking an unprecedented reappearance of the same motif on different denominations.7 In these versions, however, the motifs highlighted Jings imperial stature. In the 1883 design, her name is
emphasized by reducing it to one enlarged inscription, while the
paulownia, which is associated with Japanese imperial iconography,
is woven into the fabric of the decorative frame.
The three Jing banknotes of 1881-1883 circulated until 1899 and
were mentioned in several articles of the Yomiuri newspaper.8 But
1899 did not signal the end of Jings appearance in modern Japanese official design: the Chiossone portrait was reused for a treasury
bond in 1904, appropriately funding expenditures on the RussoJapanese War (1904-1905).9 In 1908 the chief engraver at the Printing Bureau, yama Sukeichi (1858-1922), introduced the Jing
portrait into the design of five and ten-yen postage stamps, using the
colors green and purple respectively.10 These high-denomination
stamps were intended to meet the increase in mail with foreign destinations. To combat the threat of counterfeit, the same strategy used
for paper money was applied here, the design of portraits being
considered safest. According to the historian of stamps, Hibata
Sekko, the decision to employ the Jing image was based on the
precedent set by Chiossones banknotes as well as on Jings importance within the history of (international) traffic (ktsshi kara mitemo
igi ga atte). Although scholars approached the Print Bureau to argue
for the alteration of Chiossones portrait based on new historical and
archeological evidence that showed Jings hairdo and garments to
be otherwise than depicted, it was decided that the Jing image of
the early 1880s should in no way be tampered with.11 When the
original plates for these stamps were destroyed by fire during the
7
Nihon kahei zukan [Illustrated catalogue of Japanese banknotes] (Tokyo: Ty
Keizai shinpsha, 1981), p. 280; Fukunaga, Stamp Museum Catalogue, p. 19.
8
The paper reported the frequent incidence of counterfeit one-yen Jing notes
(mentioned on 7 January 1882, 29 March 1882, 25 June 1884, 8 July 1884, and 28
December 1889).
9
For a reproduction of the bond, see Fukunaga, Stamp Museum Catalogue, p. 67.
10
For more on yamas workincluding his engagement at the American Bank
Note Company between 1891 and 1900, where he engraved portraits of American
presidents and female allegories such as Columbia, as well as his introduction of an
American style of engraving to Japansee Uemura Takashi, Nihon shihei no ban
chkokusha tachi [Banknote engravers of Japan: E. Chiossone, S. Oyama, K. Kato]
(Tokyo: Insatsu chykai foundation, 2001), pp. 17-35.
11
Hibata, Kitte shiron, pp. 108-109.

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earthquake of September 1923, they were immediately replaced by

a revised Jing portrait for five and ten-yen stamps, which were
issued in 1924 and reprinted on new paper in 1937.12 This time,
however, Jings appearance was completely modified according to
research done by the archeologist Takahashi Kenji (1871-1929). 13
While these stamps were valid throughout wartime Japan, after 1945
Jings image was removed from most spheres of public consumption.14
The Jing pictures of the early 1880s raise a number of questions:
Why was Empress Jing selected to feature so prominently on a
readily available, visual and public medium as the first and only
woman to represent the young Japanese nation-state? What was the
reason for depicting her in an iconic portrait rather than in a narrative context? What led to the decision to bestow on her a hybrid
Western/Japanese guise replete with feminine attributes and prehistoric elements, yet divested of the male warrior outfit that characterizes her quasi-historic, ambiguously gendered persona?
European coins and postage stamps of the nineteenth century
regularly featured the ruling king or queenwitness Queen Victoria

12

Teishin Hakubutsukan (Communications Museum), ed., Genshoku Nihon ybin

kitte zukan [Picture book of Japanese postage stamps] (Tokyo: Daiichi hki shuppan
kabushiki kaisha, 1965), pp. 28-31.
13
Hibata records the changes and the respective evidence. The decorative frame
was also altered based on the combination of a modern geometric design and a rubbing from a Japanese mirror kept at the Sumida Hachiman shrine in Wakayama
prefecture (Hibata, Kitte shiron, pp. 212-215). Reproductions of both stamps are
included in Fukunaga, Stamp Museum Catalogue, pp. 46, 48. My thanks to Tanabe
Ryta for generously sharing his vast knowledge of postage-stamp design and for
providing the opportunity to study originals of these now extremely precious
stamps.
14
Apart from banknotes and stamps, Jing also disappeared from the doll industry, as testified to by catalogues of the famous Tokyo doll store Yoshitoku. While the
Taiksaku Gosekkuhin katarogu [Catalogue of objects by Taik for the May Festival] of
the 1930s and early 1940s regularly featured a great variety of Jing dolls, paintings
and prints, these disappeared after 1945. According to the heir of this family business, Kobayashi Sumie, the demand for Jing dolls declined drastically after the war
and it was thought inappropriate that the store should have them on offer. My
thanks to Ms. Kobayashi and the curator of the Yoshitoku collection, Mr. Hayashi,
for sharing valuable information with me. Although the reasons for this development
are unclear, veneration of Empress Jing and her son jin (alias Hachiman) as deities of war doubtless lies at the heart of this shift in their reception after Japanese
defeat in the Pacific War.

representing meiji japan

63

of England (r. 1837-1901) on the Canadian five-dollar note of 1860.15

Interestingly, though, as often as Western rulers appeared on coins
and stamps, they were not in fact represented on banknotes in their
respective nation-states until after the Jing notes of the 1880s. The
reason for this may have been a popular distrust of paper money.
The only notes showing a sovereign were in fact issued by colonial
authorities. The image of Queen Victoria on Canadian and Australian notes circa 1860, for instance, might have been seen as desirable
so as to foster visual knowledge of a shared head of state and promote
a sense of unity among distant countries ruled by a single monarch.
Already in 1872, and following the lead of Western prototypes, the
director of the new Japanese Mint, the Englishman Thomas Kinder
(dates unknown), had proposed that the Emperor Meiji be represented on banknotesa proposal that was not taken up.16 Tokun
Rynosuke, head of the banknote bureau between 1874 and 1883,
contended in a memorandum written in February 1877, that the
main imperative when producing the revised paper money (kaiz
shihei) was to prevent counterfeiting and that the most effective way
to accomplish this was by printing photographic portraits in the manner of Western banknotes, which mostly showed images of the head
of state. Ideally, such a portrait should be included in an oval-shaped
frame on the front right-hand side of the banknote but, the
memorandum continues, there is nothing suitable [in Japan].17
Eight years later, Emperor Meiji himself suggested depicting the
(allegedly) first human emperor, Jinmu Tenn, on a banknote, but
even this august wish was rejected by imperial advisor Motoda Nagazane (1818-1891), who claimed that the image of an imperial ancestor would become soiled through its being handled by all manner of
people; moreover, the value of the notes would rise and fall, thus

15
For a reproduction of the note and a general discussion of women on banknotes, see Virginia H. Hewitt, ed., Beauty and the Banknote: Images of Women on Paper
Money, exhibition catalogue (London: British Museum, 1994), p. 53, fig. 72. I thank
Helen Wang, curator for East Asian money in the Department of Coins and Medals
at the British Museum, for her observations regarding my project and for a copy of
the Hewitt catalogue.
16
Kinder was invited to Japan in 1870 and served as head of the Mint (Zheikyoku) between 1871 and 1875, after which he returned to England.
17
See kurash hyakunenshi, vol. 2, pp. 60-61.

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suggesting the rise and fall of the emperor so represented. 18 Thus,

not a single emperor or queen was ever depicted on this everyday
medium, either during the Meiji era or thereafter.
However, Emperor Meiji and his consort Shken were photographed by Uchida Kuichi (1844-1875) in 1872 and 1873, this second sitting resulting in the official imperial portraits, which were
subsequently reproduced and adapted in a variety of formats and
media including woodblock prints and lithographs,19 some of the
latter being mounted on hanging scrolls in the 1880s and 1890s and
serving as icons for worship in schools and other public spaces. The
photographic images also form part of the constructed lineages of
Japanese emperors from the sun goddess Amaterasu to the Meiji
emperor, which variably highlight Amaterasu, Emperor Jinmu,
Emperor Meiji and the crown prince, or with the contemporary
imperial family in the center; one such hanging scroll, which apparently dates to the 1890s, is preserved at the Vlkerkundemuseum
von Portheim-Stiftung in Heidelberg (Figure 2.4).20
Jing is omitted in these lineages.21 She was, however, included
as an independent empress in the imperial genealogies of the first
written history of Japan, the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan from the
18

See Wakakuwa Midori, Kg no shz: Shken ktaig no hysh to josei no kokuminka

[Portraits of the empress: Representations of Empress Shken and the nationalization of women] (Tokyo: Chikuma shob, 2001), pp. 382-383, 390.
19
For a good collection of a variety of adaptations in different print media, see
ke no shz: Meiji kshitsu arubamu no hajimari [Portraits of the imperial family: The
beginning of the Meiji imperial household album] (Yokohama: Kanagawa kenritsu
rekishi hakubutsukan, 2001).
20
The hanging scroll measures 98.2 45.8 cm. I am indebted to Birgit Mayr for
mentioning this scroll to me and I thank Margarete Pavaloi for permission to study
the work. A note accompanying the scroll states that the painting was given to a German envoy as a prize won in a shooting contest at a party of the imperial household.
See Birgit Mayr and Sasaki Toshikazu, eds., Japanische Holzschnitte und Bcher im Museum fr Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt am Main und im Vlkerkundemuseum der von PortheimStiftung Heidelberg, Bestandskatalog japanischer Kulturgter in Deutschland 2:
Furankufuruto kgei bijutsukan, Fon Porutohaimu kikin Haideruberuku minzoku hakubutsukan
shoz ukiyoe hanga, wahon hen, Zaidoku Nihon bunkazai sg mokuroku 2 (Tokyo:
Kokusho kankkai, 2004), nos. 111, 190.
Similar but abbreviated genealogies of the ruling emperor are reproduced in Egakareta Meiji Nippon: Sekihanga ritogurafu no jidai/Kenkyhen: The Age of Lithograph in Japan,
Research Volume (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 2002), pp. 89-93.
21
If Jing had been included, she should have appeared between the fourteenth
and fifteenth tenn in the second row beneath Amaterasus image, to the left of Chai
who wears armor, and to the right of jin who is portrayed holding a shaku scepter.

representing meiji japan

65

Figure 2.4. Portraits of all Emperors and Ancestral Deities of Great Japan (DaiNihon jink mank
goshkei), hanging scroll, lithograph, 98.2 45.8 cm, 1890s, Vlkerkundemuseum
der von Portheim-Stiftung, Heidelberg (call no. 37674-045), and Inge Klinger.

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Earliest Times), dated 720, and Kitabatake Chikafusa (1293-1354) also

lists her in his Jinn shtki (A Chronicle of the Gods and Sovereigns) of
1343.22 Popular accounts in the early nineteenth century continue
to name and depict her as the fifteenth tenn. The Encyclopedia of the
Inexhaustible Supply of Eternal Generations in Great Japan (Dai-Nihon eitai
setsuy mujinz), printed in 1831, for instance, includes, alongside an
image of Jings victorious appearance in Korea, her biography as
the fifteenth tenn.23 But the influential Mito School historians of the
Tokugawa period expunged her from the lineage of emperors in their
History of Great Japan (Dai-Nihonshi), begun in 1657 but not completed
until 1906.24 Instead, she was referred to as the interim regent ruling
after her husband Chai died and prior to her son jin ascending
the throne. Meiji officials chose to follow this interpretation, and
although Jing was regarded as an ancestor of the Meiji emperor,
she neither features in the official genealogies issued by the Meiji
government nor in visualized pedigrees such as the hanging scroll
mentioned above. In the late nineteenth century, therefore, Jing
lacked the iconicity of a sanctified queen, which would have foredoomed her depiction on quotidian media. However, this quality
turned herlike Prince Shtoku (574-622) on the banknote design
of 1930into an ideal figure to represent a nation striving to become
the equal of Western imperialist nations.
22
The relevant passages in the Nihon shoki are translated in W.G. Aston, Nihongi:
Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (Rutland & Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972
[1896]), pp. 224-253; the reference to Jing in the Jinn shtki is translated in Paul
Varley, A Chronicle of the Gods and Sovereigns: Jinn shtki of Kitabatake Chikafusa (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 101-103. Chikafusa mentions in this
passage that Jing administered the country as regent [sessh] (p. 102) but lists her
as Empress Jing, fifteenth reign (p. 101) following Chai (the fourteenth reign)
and preceding jin (sixteenth reign) (p. 103).
23
A copy dating to 1864 is kept at Waseda University Library, among other
places. See Tsukamoto Akira, Jing kg densetsu to kinsei Nihon no Chsenkan:
The Role of Empress Jingu Myth in constructing Edo-era perceptions of Korea,
Shirin 79:6 (November, 1996): 27.
Jings popularity in the early twentieth century resulted in the (unsuccessful)
movement to reinsert her in the official lineage of emperors as the fifteenth generation. See an article in the Yomiuri newspaper on 30 May 1924, Jing kg o dai
15dai on-rekidai ni kuwae [Adding Empress Jing as the fifteenth emperor to history].
24
Jings reign is subsumed in the biography of Emperor Chai, the fourteenth
generation of human emperors, in the Dai-Nihonshi, vol. 3, published in Kshaku Tokugawake zhan Dai-Nihonshi [History of Great Japan according to the version in the
collection of Marquis Tokugawa] (Tokyo, 1928), pp. 31-36.

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67

The Jing Narrative

In what follows, I will summarize the main plot of the Jing narrative
and briefly review the transmission of the text and the reception of
Jing imagery. This textual and visual history offers the necessary
background for an understanding of both the revolutionary character of the imagined Jing portraits of the 1880s and the popular
reception of this unusual depiction.
The most widely used version of the Jing narrative is part of the
Hachiman myth, the Hachiman gudkun, which dates back to the
beginning of the fourteenth century.25 The Gudkun was most probably composed by priests of the Iwashimizu Hachimang shrine as
a foundation narrative for their religious center. The Iwashimizu
Hachimang is located south of Kyoto and was at the time the most
important shrine for Hachiman rituals performed by the imperial
household. The overt proto-nationalist flavor of the Gudkun must be
evaluated against its historical backdrop so as to explain the colorful
adaptation of the comparatively tame version of the Jing narrative
in both the Kojiki (dated 712) and the Nihon shoki.26 The two attempted
invasions of the Mongols in 1274 and 1281 constituted the first
attacks by a foreign military force on Japanese soil and were shocking
experiences that had a number of political and cultural consequences.
Hachiman was considered the foremost guardian deity protecting
against the invaders, an interpretation that put the hitherto elite
Hachiman worship on a broader, more popular basis in terms of
both social and regional distribution. As a result, numerous Hachiman shrines were constructed across the Japanese archipelago and
new narratives and imagery appeared, thus leading to wide reception
of the Gudkun. In this text, Empress Jing is not only referred to as
the fifteenth emperor of Japan but she is also understood within a

25
Two versions of the Hachiman gudkun are published in Jisha engi, Nihon shis
taikei 20 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1982), pp. 169-273. The widely known version A
is thought to date to the reign of Emperor Hanazono (r. 1308-1318), the less circulated version B predates version A slightly (presumably 1301-1304); see Jisha engi,
p. 207.
26
The Jing passage included in the Kojiki is translated in Donald L. Philippi
(Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968), pp. 262-271; for the Nihon shoki account,
see footnote 22.

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Buddhist context to be a manifestation of Amida Buddha and of the

Sacred Mother Bodhisattva (Seibo Daibosatsu).27
The text relates the story of Empress Jing and her successful
defeat of the three Korean kingdoms in the third century CE. Her
husband, Emperor Chai courageously kills a foreign, eight-headed
demon that is attacking the Japanese people, and is in turn killed by
a stray arrow during the battle.28 In retribution, Jing invades the
Korean peninsula and forces the Korean kings to send an annual
tribute to Japan. She achieves this remarkable military victory with
the help of indigenous deities, most prominently Sumiyoshi, her
magical empowerment owing to the baby boy in her womb and a
physical and sartorial transformation immediately preceding her
invasion of the Korean peninsula. The passage referring to Jings
masculine appearance is one of the many remarkable expansions of
the Gudkun vis--vis the eighth-century Kojiki and Nihon shoki textual
models.
The Gudkun text is adapted, for instance, in the set of two illuminated Jing handscrolls from 1433 and preserved at the Konda
Hachiman Shrine in Habikino-shi, Osaka. Hachiman worship was
and is an integral part of Jings popularity, and most written
accounts of her legend are therefore actually entitled Hachiman engi.
The story of The Karmic Origin of Hachiman incorporates the
Jing narrative in order to explain Hachimans superior nature as
the deity of war. The prominent scrolls are the earliest extant Hachiman engi to be produced by a high-ranking patron, the sixth Ashikaga
shogun, Yoshinori (shogun 1428-1441). He employed first-rate painters and scribes and significantly changed the visual representation
of the text, his version subsequently functioning as a model for many
important Hachiman handscroll productions through to the nineteenth century.29 The accompanying text in the scrolls relates her
physical transformation:
27

The respective text passages in the Gudkun are on pp. 170 and 172 in Jisha

engi.
28
The Gudkun turns Emperor Chais weak character, as described in both the
Kojiki and Nihon shoki, into that of a brave warrior with superhuman qualities. This
change, like many others, served to further vilify the Korean people and increase
popular respect for emperors as well as arguing for the martial disposition of his and
Jings son jin (see below).
29
The scrolls are part of a large Hachiman painting production and are reproduced in Emakimonosh: Konda sby engi, Jing Kg engi [Sets of illuminated hand-

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69

The empress immediately took on the appearance of a man. She measured nine feet two inches tall [2.67 m], her teeth were an inch and a
half long and were lustrous. She bound her shiny black hair into side
locks and placed a helmet on the Chinese topknot. She took a bow
made of tara wood and added arrows with eight-eyed heads. The bow
was called mitarashi [the venerable bow] and was made from tara wood.
She clapped a tachi sword to her side and bound straw boots onto her
feet. Over her red pants she put on armor of the kara-ayaodoshi
type.30

Jings transformation is not restricted to a sartorial alteration, but

includes a dramatic increase in the size of her body and teeth that
prefigures her superhuman martial qualities. Her physical change
takes place at the precise moment when her pregnant body is on the
verge of delivery:
The month to give birth had come and her breasts were big. In order
to fit the armor, the great deity Kra cut a piece from the body armor
and added it as shields beneath. What today is called a side-shield
originates in this precedent. At this point, the empress felt the birth
approaching. When she started to suffer under the pains of labor, she
descended from the boat in Tsushima and tied white stones around
her hips to cool her belly. She prayed: Should the child I am pregnant
with become the leader of Japan, then he shall not leave my body for
another month. She then boarded the ship again.

The depiction of Jing as commander-in-chief follows this and the

next passage describing her subjugation of the Korean kings (Figure
2.5). Although Jings presence is implied in a number of scenes,
throughout the two handscrolls only her immediate military involvescrolls: The Karmic Origins of the Konda Imperial Tomb, and The Karmic
Origins of Empress Jing] (Habikino-shi: Habikinoshi-shi bunkazaihen bessatsu,
1991). The title, which is included in the handscroll proper, was chosen in 1443,
probably so as to distinguish this work from a second set of scrolls offered to the
same shrine on the same day in 1433 and entitled Konda sby engi emaki. Two other
sets of scrolls also donated on the same day in 1433 have some of the very same
iconography as the Jing kg engi but are entitled Hachiman engi emaki. For a translation of the colophon and a discussion of the political and aesthetic implications of
these handscrolls, see Melanie Trede, Appell an den Kriegsgott: Ikonographische
Innovationen im Dienst politischer Rivalitt, in Frank R. Pfetsch, ed., Konflikt,
Heidelberger Jahrbcher (2004): 255-277.
30
Emakimonosh, p. 156. The translations of this and the following passage are
mine. A fully annotated translation of the Jing narrative as related in the scrolls is
forthcoming in my monograph, The Political Manipulation of Myths in Japanese Pictorial
Narratives (working title). The equivalent passage in the Hachiman gudkun can be found
in Jisha engi, p. 174.

Figure 2.5. Jing kg engi emaki, handscroll, Detail of scroll 2, ink and colors on paper, height 35.4 cm; 1433; Konda
Hachiman Shrine, Habikino-shi.

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71

ment while girded in male armor prompts explicit visual representations. In this scene she is shown as a military commander with an
arresting, frontal pose facing the kneeling Korean kings. She points
her bow at a large rock, which she has inscribed with a humiliating
phrase not rendered in this depiction. Her attire closely follows the
textual description, except that her dragon-shaped helmet crest
(shigami maedate), body armor and swords are represented in shining
gold, thus highlighting her central role in this scene. The only hint
given of her female sex is the flower design on her bright-red garment, and her white complexion.31
Just after her victorious return to Japan, Jing gives birth to the
future Emperor jin. jins popular nickname was tainai ji or
prince within the womb. This term refers to jin already ruling
as a prince (ji) in his mothers womb (tainai) as she invades Korea.
The expression seems to lessen her agency by attributing the success
of the invasion to the embryo jin.32 jins Buddhist manifestation
as Great Bodhisattva Hachiman (Hachiman Daibosatsu) has been
documented as early as the Nara period when he began to be venerated as the ancestral deity of the imperial family. The deity was
invited from Usa in Northeast Kyushu in the mid-eighth century to
oversee the construction of the Great Buddha at Tdaiji temple in
Nara.33 In the twelfth century, the Minamoto warrior clan appropri31
There are also examples of male warriors, such as Minamoto no Yoshitsune of
the twelfth century, who are depicted with an unusually white complexion to emphasize their youth and social status.
32
The Sanja takusen ryakush [A brief summary of the oracles of the three shrines],
attributed to Matsumoto Kiyofusa, and written in Kyoto in 1650 (but not printed
prior to 1657), expands on the notion of jins predestination as deity of war. In a
translation by Brian Bocking it reads:

At this time, the empress Jing was pregnant with the imperial prince. Taking
hold of a volume of a war-book (This is as referred to in Sanryaku by our contemporary
Lord seki) at a time when the fighting was furious, the empress burned the book
and devoured the ashes, crying out the imperial prince is in my womb; he will
imbibe and understand this book. Though I may be weak and ineffective, the
prince will surely be in good health. The battle lasted three years, but very
gradually victory was achieved....It is said that because the empress had consumed the ashes of the war-book early on while the baby was in her womb, he
could read this volume as soon as he was born.
Brian Bocking, The Oracles of the Three Shrines: Windows on Japanese Religion (Richmond:
Curzon, 2001), p. 61.
33
On early Hachiman worship, see Martin Repp, HachimanProtecting kami
of the Japanese Nation, in Klaus Antoni, et al., eds., Religion and National Identity in

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ated Hachiman as their guardian deity as well, and in addition to

his protective qualities, Hachiman was venerated as the god of war
from the late Heian period.34
Following an account of jins birth, Jings death, and a summary of jins achievements, the text recounts Hachimans miraculous manifestations and oracles. Hachiman appears at a number of
sacred sites and causes the creation of the main ritual centers of
Hachiman worship. Although varying according to the text version,
most frequently concluding the narrative is construction of the
Hachiman shrines at Hakozaki, Usa and Iwashimizu.
As we have seen, the Jing narrative originates in the earliest
historical chronicles of the eighth century and it was revised and
embellished in the fourteenth century. As of the late seventeenth
century, the plot was adapted and considerably altered in popular
puppet theater and kabuki performances.35 Prose versions of the plot
were printed with illustrations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these being reprinted well into the twentieth century. 36 The
Jing narrative was depicted in a number of both official and private
picture formats from the twelfth through the twentieth centuries. 37

the Japanese Context (Mnster: LIT, 2002), pp. 169-192.

34
Consequently, the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), who
resided in Japan from 1690 to 1694 and traveled from Dejima in the south to Edo in
1691 and 1692, described the Hachiman shrine in the village Suzu no Mori (between
Kanagawa and Edo) in terms of his European knowledge of the deity of war: At the
end of that village stood a Hachiman or Mars temple. Beatrice Bodard-Bailey,
Kaempfers Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1999), p. 348.
35
One of the earliest known performances in the Tokugawa period is the kygen
Jing kg, tsuketari Sankan Taiji [Empress Jing and the extermination of the three
Korean kingdoms], performed in Osaka at the Arashi Sanuemon-za on New Years
day 1695.
36
The titles of these narratives vary from Illustrated Account of Empress Jings Extermination of the Three Korean Kingdoms ([Jing kg] Sankan taiji zue, 1844, illustrated by
Katsushika Taito (see below), to (Empress Jings) Subjugation of the Three Korean Kingdoms
(A Record) (Jing kg) Sankan seibatsu (ki). The taiji of the former title emphasizes the
devilish character of the Koreans, while seibatsu refers to a more political act of
subduing enemies who are disobedient.
37
The earliest mention of Images of the Karmic Origins of Hachiman (Hachiman engi-e)
date to the twelfth century; they are lost to us today but were copied by an aristocrat
in the Hji era (1247-1249). See Nakano Genz, Hachiman engi-e no tenkai [The
development of images of the Karmic Origins of Hachiman] Shinsh Nihon emakimono zensh 30 (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1980), p. 68. Even earlier were probably Hachiman panel paintings attached to the Picture Hall (edono) within the Denpin of

representing meiji japan

73

Particularly after the Kansei Reforms of the late eighteenth century

and again in the mid-nineteenth century under the threat of a foreign
invasion, texts and images of Empress Jing were ubiquitous at all
levels of elite and popular discourse.38
Empress Jings Four Personas
In what follows, I argue that in addition to Jings imperial background, her physical transformationwhile still retaining her female
personaturned her into an appropriate figure to represent the
young Meiji nation-state. In the written and visual popular representations of Jing in the mid-nineteenth century, she was variously
imagined and imaged as either a goddess, as a martial mother
equipped with supernatural qualities, as a warrior and prototype of
Japanese interests on foreign terrain, or as a virtuous wife. An anal-

Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine, which survive only as a copied scroll dating to 1483
(Bunmei 15). See Nakano, The Development of Images, p. 68.
Miya Tsugio surmised, however, that the origin of Hachiman engi handscrolls
date to after 1221, which is three hundred years after construction of the Hakozaki
Hachiman Shrine (in 921) as mentioned in the narrative. See Miya, Hachiman
Daibosatsu goengi to Hachiman engi, ge [The Karmic origins of the great Bodhisattva Hachiman and Karmic origins of Hachiman, part 3], Bijutsu kenky
336 (August 1986): 63. It is questionable, though, whether the text of the scrolls
should be interpreted as making accurate use of the historical facts, as Miya suggests.
Two sets of fourteenth-century hanging scrolls are in the possession of the Tamatareg and the Shikaumi Jinja shrines in Northern Kyushu. Kikutake Junichi,
Kysh no engi-e [Paintings of miraculous origins of temples in Kyushu], Bukky
geijutsu (July 1970): 57-80.
Hachiman engi handscrolls are too abundant to list, but a select number of them
are mentioned in a series of articles by Miya, Hachiman engi, Parts 1, 2, 3, Bijutsu
kenky 333 (September 1985): 149-158; 335 (March 1986): 15-23; and 336 (August
1986): 57-67.
38
The Kansei Reforms included a prohibition against depicting current events.
As a result, historical narratives boomed in popular prints and books. On the implications of the cultural politics and print production following the Kansei reforms, see
Sarah Thompson and Harry Harootunian, Undercurrents in the Floating World: Censorship and Japanese Prints (New York: The Asia Society Galleries, 1991), pp. 56-72.
Jing also lived on in the cultural consciousness of the first half of the twentieth
century. Watsuji Tetsur (1889-1960), professor of ethics in Kyoto recalls being
raised with the Jing narrative and even remembers her inscription on the Korean
rock. See his Nihon rinri shisshi [History of Japanese ethics] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten,
1952), as quoted in Tsukamoto, Jing kg densetsu, p. 32.

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ysis of the texts and images immediately preceding the Jing portraits
in the 1870s and 1880s will allow us to test the reception of Jing
during the early Meiji era and to judge the novelty of Chiossones
work.
Jing as Goddess
The deified Jing first appears in sculptural form as part of Hachiman triads in the tenth century.39 The knowledge of Jings identity
as one of the two female attendants to the central icon Hachiman
or in any case as a deity frequently revered in Hachiman shrines
was presumably also widespread in the late Tokugawa period, given
its mention in printed travel guidebooks.40
In a more public space and popular event, the festival float funeboko
(literally ship halberd) of the annual Gion festival in Kyoto includes
the central figure of Jing kg (Figure 2.6).41 The figure used on
todays floatwith an inscription from 1616 (Genna 2) and a facial
mask dating to the Bunan era (1448)is popularly referred to as
the deitys body (goshintai). 42 The figure expresses an iconographic
eclecticism through its reference to a number of different cultural
traditions. Jing is represented in hiodoshi armor and with a tall crown
(tenkan) reminiscent of ornaments decorating bodhisattvas, while the

39
See Christine Guth Kanda, Shinz: Hachiman Imagery and its Development (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 5156.
40
For example, the Sangoku meish zue [Illustrated guidebook to famous sites of the
three states] vol. 30, printed in 1843, describes Empress Jing, Emperor jin, and
his consort Tamayorihime as the main deities of the Hachiman Nittag in Satsuma
domain (modern Kagoshima Prefecture). The quote is reproduced in Nihon meisho
fzoku zue 15, Kysh no maki, ed. Asakura Haruhiko (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten,
1983), p. 470.
41
For a comprehensive account of the Gion festival, see Gion Matsuri Hensan
Iinkai and Gion Matsuri Yamaboko Rengkai, eds., Gion matsuri (Tokyo: Chikuma
Shob, 1976). The history of the funeboko is related on pp. 83-84. On the role of Jing
as part of the funeboko and other floats in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting,
see Kamei Wakana, Hysh toshite no bijutsu, gensetsu toshite no bijutsushi: Muromachi shgun
Ashikaga Yoshiharu to Tosa Mitsumochi no kaiga [Art as representation, art history as
discourse: The Muromachi Shogun Ashikaga Yoshiharu and Tosa Mitsumochis
paintings] (Tokyo: Perikansha, 2003), pp. 233-235.
42
See the URL http://www.city.kyoto.jp/shimogyo/yamaboko/06fune.html
(accessed on 26 November 2007).

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Figure 2.6. Jing figure in the Funeboko float, Gion Festival, Kyoto, diverse media,
1616; photograph by the author.

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mask and large garment worn over her armor evoke associations
with Noh theater. Cloth belts wrapped around her body refer to her
pregnant condition;43 at the end of the festival, they are cut into
pieces and distributed to pregnant women. This custom indicates
popular reverence of Jing as a guardian deity of safe childbirth.
According to one source, ever since the Tokugawa period, this figure
was also worshiped by the imperial household on the occasion of a
childs birth.44 In this photograph, the Jing figure is shown in a
display prior to the Gion festival, replete with offerings on an altarlike arrangement and a chrysanthemum-crested white curtain to
emphasize her deified status.
A large number of votive tablets with depictions of Jing as a
pregnant woman refer to her as a deity associated with safe childbirth
or as a patron of midwives. Although early examples are rare due
to the nature of the wooden material and its exposure to weather,
the inscription on one votive tablet tells of the birth of a son in
December of the year of the snake (1905).45
The Kyoto-based Katsurame maidens (and prostitutes) also chose
Jing as their guardian deity and issued paper charms.46 They sometimes wrote their name Katsura-me, using the characters for VicUntil recently, the so-called Iwata obi or Iwata haramaki (obi)-belt
() was employed as a method to protect a baby in the womb from the fifth month
of gestation onward. This custom is associated with Jings precaution for safe delivery before her invasion of Korea; see osaka.yomiuri.co.jp/gion/tour/fune.htm (accessed on 8 December 2007).
44
See http://osaka.yomiuri.co.jp/gion/tour/fune.htm as well as http://
mirahouse.dyndns.org/~mira/kyoto/gion/funa/funa.html (both accessed on 9 December 2007). The latter website mentions that the Jing figure was transported to
the imperial palace upon the birth of the Meiji Emperor.
45
For a reproduction of this votive tablet dedicated to the Uga Shrine in Fukuoka City, see Fukuoka-shi kyiku iinkai, ed., Fukuoka-shi no ema [Votive tablets of Fukuoka City] (Fukuoka: Fukuoka-shi kyiku iinkai, 1997), vol. I, p. 130. The rendering
of the face is exactly the same in another votive picture from 1923 depicting Jing in
a bust portrait and including an inscription referring to a wish by a 24-year-old
woman (see Fukuoka-shi no ema, vol. II, p. 35).
46
See Wakita Haruko, The Formation of the Ie and Medieval Myth: The
Shintsh, N Theater, and Picture Scrolls of Temple Origins, in Haruko Wakita,
Anne Bouchy and Ueno Chizuko, eds., Gender and Japanese History (Osaka: Osaka
University Press, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 53-85, especially pp. 70-76; see also Tsukamoto,
Jing kg densetsu, pp. 1-33. Tsukamoto remarks that the Katsurame charms
begin to spread from the mid-eighteenth century onward, but this date only signifies
that the local governmental offices (machi bugysho) officially accepted them; their existence is in fact much older.
43

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torious Inlet (Katsu-ura) and thus referring to Jing and her

successful invasion of Korea starting from Japanese shores.
A less obvious rendering of Jing as a deity is her depiction by a
disciple of Hokusai, Katsushika Taito (fl. 1810-1853) in the novel
Illustrated Account of Empress Jings Extermination of the Three Korean Kingdoms ([Jing kg] Sankan taiji zue), from the year 1844 (Figure 2.7).
The title of the novel is significant, since it shifts the focus of the
story, as told in the Gudkun, away from Hachiman to Jing herself
and her subjugation of the Korean kingdoms.47 In this illustration,
Jing is depicted on the top right of the picture plane in the lofty
room of an aristocratic residence, and she rests on a raised dais
covered with straw mats. Paper-festoons (nusa) surround her, white
banners serve as a backdrop, and a cartouche identifies her as kg
(empress). The paper-festoons clearly point to her goddess status,
since they were dedicated to deities; Jing is depicted as a Japanese
noblewoman, with painted eyebrows, long black hair, and garments
resembling the twelve-layer robes (jni hitoe) worn by court ladies
during the Heian period.
Jing as Martial Mother
From around the eighteenth century until the end of World War II,
Jing was most frequently represented in armor within the framework of a type of divine warrior family. This sacred trinity was a
regular part of the annual Boys Festival decorations, celebrated on
the fifth day of the fifth month. Dolls show Jing in warrior apparel
with her advisor Minister Takeuchi no Sukune cradling her infant,
the future emperor jin (Figure 2.8). In this mid-nineteenth century
gosekku arrangement owned by a Kyoto family, both Jing and
Takeuchi soar above an assortment of martial accoutrements. Jing
wears tall, golden headgear (eboshi) and luxurious armor topped by
a wide-cut, embroidered garment. She holds a bow in her left hand

47
The earliest appearance of Jing in a book title is the set of handscrolls from
1433, mentioned above. The first use of Jing in the title of a kabuki play dates to
1695 (Genroku 8). To the best of my knowledge this play, Jing kg, recorded in the
Kabuki Chronology (Kabuki nenpy), is not extant. See Hotei Kokusho smokuroku, Complete
List of Japanese Books, revised and expanded edition (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990),
vol. 4, p. 651.

Figure 2.7. Sankan taiji zue, double-spread designed by Katsushika Taito (fl. 1810-1853), woodblock-printed book, 1844; National Diet
Library, Tokyo.

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Figure 2.8. Decoration for the Boys Festival, mid-nineteenth century, diverse materials, size of the Jing figure: 41.9 20.8 19.3 cm (height including the eboshi hat:
50.0 cm), originally belonging to the Irie Family.

and the five long arrows on her back are arranged so as to emphasize
her central position.
Paintings of the same iconography on silk, such as those by an
early nineteenth-century revivalist of the Japanese style, Ukita Ikkei
(1795-1859) (Figure 2.9), were produced for the same occasion on
behalf of wealthy households, while prints of the same iconography
were readily available for popular consumption. Jings martial
apparel is central to this iconography, but it varies according to the
needs of the consumers. The large empty spaces on top of the Ikkei

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Figure 2.9. Ukita Ikkei (1795-1859), Empress Jing, Takeuchi no Sukune and Prince jin,
diptych of hanging scrolls, each 98.5 34.6 cm, ink and color on silk; Tochigi Prefectural Museum.

representing meiji japan

81

pair of hanging scrolls are due to the original display in which

decorative strings (himokazari) were meant to cover the area, one
indication that this painting may have served devotional functions.48
Jing as Warrior
Jings role as the general of a Japanese army fighting a victorious
war against foreign enemies is the third iconography of Jings multifaceted personas. Jing is represented in this narrative context as
a warrior in male dress on numerous large-scale wooden votive tablets dedicated to shrines that are mostly to be found in southwestern
Japan.49 One of the oldest examples dates to Kansei 4 (1792). It
measures more than one-and-a-half by two meters and was dedicated
by parishioners to the important Hakozaki Shrine in Fukuoka City.50
The tablet represents various of Jings martial accomplishments,
such as the climax of the sea battle, inscribing the rock with a humiliating phrase addressed to the Korean kings, and subjugating the
kings before their own palace. Regional painters, sponsored by a
variety of patrons, were hired to copy the invariable iconography on
countless votive tablets.
Printed books and print series of certain select warriors of the past
frequently include Jing. She is shown as an imposing, war-like figure
and the only woman in Three Examples of Martial Bravery (Buy
sanban tsuzuki), a surimono print series designed for private consumption by Katsukawa Shuntei (1770-1820) and datable to 1820 (Figure
2.10). In a monumental full frontal pose, Jing accepts the two tide
jewels from a kneeling messenger of the dragon kings, the jewels
tokens of her military success.
The first of the prints inscribed poems by Katanoue Koreneba
in celebration of Jings martial achievement conveys a strong whiff

48
I am grateful to Honda Satoshi from the Tochigi Prefectural Museum for permission to study and photograph the scrolls.
49
See Richard W. Anderson, Jing Kg Ema in Southwestern Japan: Reflections and Anticipations of the Seikanron Debate in the Late Tokugawa and Early
Meiji Period, Asian Folklore Studies 61 (2002): 247-270.
50
For a reproduction of this votive tablet, see Fukuoka-shi no ema, vol. 1, p. 29 and
vol. 3, p. 19.

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Figure 2.10. Katsukawa Shuntei (1770-1820), Empress Jing, series: Buy sanban tsuzuki
[Three examples of martial bravery]; 1820; signed: Shksai Katsukyko Shuntei ga;
poetry club seal: Taikogawa; surimono print, shikishiban (21.8 18.9 cm); photograph courtesy of Joan Mirviss (owner: Barbara Bowman).

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83

of nationalism, thus testifying to the very real political implications

of the Jing-as-warrior iconography.
hi no moto no
From the land of the rising sun
ume no kaori no
The scent of plum blossoms
tsuyo yumi ni
Discharged by a strong crossbow
morokoshibito no
Is thrust into the noses
hana mo sashikeri
Of the Korean people.51
Jing as Virtuous Wife
Another iconography uses the Jing imagery to cast her in the role
of virtuous wife and mother. An example is a tanzaku print included
in the series Eight Views of Virtuous Women (Kenjo hakkei) designed
by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) circa 1843 (Figure 2.11). This
series parodies the iconography of the Eight Views of Xiao and
Xiang, a Chinese painting subject incorporated into the Japanese
canon in the Muromachi period (1392-1573). The Jing print is
entitled Tsukushi kiban (Returning Sails off Tsukushi), an allusion
to the original Enpo kiban (Returning Sails off Distant Shores). Jing
surveys the homecoming of the Japanese fleet after her victory on
the Korean peninsula and immediately preceding the birth of jin
in Tsukushi. Although she wears swords, along with a bow and a
quiver of arrows, her martial outfit is scaled down in favor of widecut and colorfully embroidered garments (including the imperial
motif of phoenixes) reminiscent of Noh costumes. The inscription
51

The translation is by John Carpenter. Katanoue Koreneba is a nom de plume

of Nait Kyz (or Kuz), a Taikogawa poet from Yoshihama in Mikawa province,
active in the Fukagawa district of Edo. The second poem is by Washutei Nomiyasu
(literally, Japanese Wine is Easy to Drink), probably the same person as Sakenoya
Nomiyasu (or Sakanoya), which is another name of Hrai Sanjin, who was the proprietor of a sake shop. The poem refers to the worship of Empress Jing at shrines
on New Years Day:
chihayaburu
At the dawn of spring
kami no yashiro e As the warbler chants,
hatsu haru no
We make a pilgrimage
eh mairi ya
To the sacred shrine
uguisu no koe
Of the mighty deities.
My thanks to John Carpenter for the information regarding the poets various
names. Published in Joan Mirviss and John Carpenter, Bunka Bunsei no shugyoku no
surimono: Jewels of Japanese PrintmakingSurimono of the Bunka-Bunsei Era 1804-1830
(Tokyo: ta kinen bijutsukan, 2000), pp. 154-155.

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Figure 2.11. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), Empress Jing Watching the Victorious
Return of her Fleet from Korea, from the series: Kenjo hakkei [Eight views of virtuous
women], ca. 1843, ch tanzaku (ca. 38 13 cm), signed: Ichiysai Kuniyoshi ga,
publisher: Ihaya Sensabur, censor seal: Tanaka (Tanaka Heijir), Merlin Dailey
Collection.

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85

summarizes her biography and frames her life in relation to her

husband and son:
Empress Jing.
She was the consort of Emperor Chai. After his demise, she herself
subjugated the Three Korean Kingdoms with her pregnant body; she
received eighty ships as tribute each year, and returned with her army.
She then gave easy birth to Emperor jin in Tsukushi. Thereafter her
reign began; she administered the affairs of the realm and apportioned
benevolence among all her people. She died during the sixty-ninth year
of her reign.52

In summary, Jing was fashioned as the ideal matrix for a variety of

fantasies, desires and political objectives. Against this rich tradition
of Jing imagery, her bust portrait on banknotes from 1881 to 1883
raises the question as to how and why she was stripped of the narrative and martial associations we have reviewed above.
Jing as Western Amazon and Guardian Deity of Modernity
These questions are particularly important, since the earliest banknote of the Japanese national bank, printed in 1873, also represented Empress Jingbut in an entirely different, narrative context
(Figure 2.12).53 The first ten-yen note of Meiji Japan depicts Jing,
in the center of the bill, as a Western Amazon on horseback surveying the Korean mountains from across the ocean and leading an
army of Japanese warriors. Both her hair and her long white gar-

52
For a reproduction of another copy of this print, and two other prints of the
series, see Robert Schaap, Heroes and Ghosts: Japanese Prints by Kuniyoshi, 1797-1861
(Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 1998), pp. 117-118.
53
This is, in fact, the very first image of a woman on a Japanese banknote, and
neither Murasaki Shikibu on a 2000-yen note (issued in 2000) nor Higuchi Ichiy
(1872-1896) on the 5000-yen note (issued in 2004), as is often assumed. The National Bank (Kokuritsu Gink) was founded in 1872 but incorporated 153 private chartered banks, which, however, used the same form and design of banknotes. See
kurash insatsukyoku hyakunenshi, vol. 1, pp. 198-202; and the URL http://www.imes.
boj.or.jp/cm/english_htmls/history_19.htm (accessed on 22 November 2007). Each
design of the first five banknotes issued in August 1873 was valid through 1899 (see
Nihon kahei zukan, p. 318), when the designs of the National Bank were ultimately
suspended in favor of motifs desired by the exclusive issuing authority of the Bank of
Japan (Nihon Gink), which was founded in 1882. The Jing banknote of 1873 thus
continued to be circulated when Chiossones design of the early 1880s was issued.

Figure 2.12. Ten-yen Japanese National Banknote (old style), 8 19 cm, 1873; Bank of Japan, Currency Museum, Tokyo. A color plate
of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

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87

ments topped by an armour are of a Western cut; she rides a black

horse and carries a bow and arrows.
The banknotes of 1873 were printed by the Continental Banknote
Company in New York, and their oblong size, color and iconography
resemble U.S. banknotes of the period, the so-called greenbacks.54
Serving as obvious model for the Jing note was a ten-dollar bill of
1864 (Figure 2.13), which represents the Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto (1500-1542) on horseback discovering the Mississippi
in 1541.55 This composition is derived from the 1853 painting Discovery of the Mississippi by DeSoto, A.D. 1541 by William H. Powell, the
eighth and final painting to be placed in the Rotunda of the United
States Capitol.56 Many nation-states commemorated their past with
paintings of male heroes conquering new territories, fighting wars,
dying for their country, or forming pivotal alliances.57 Only a few
relied on historicalor quasi-historicalwomen as representatives
of a unifying national heritage, which in turn was then used to legitimize the objectives of the burgeoning nation-states. The Japanese
banknote design exchanged the male Spanish explorer for an archaic
54
The trade representative in North America at the time, Nakajima Nobuyuki
(1846-1899), was ordered to oversee the production of these banknotes (see kurash
hyakunenshi, vol. 1, pp. 202-203). However, according to Ohnuki Mari from the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan, and Matsumura Kiyoko, curator at the Banknote & Postage Stamp Museum, no further information on
the designers and decision-making process of the early banknotes is available, because most of the documents of the Bank of Japan were consumed in fire during the
Great Kant Earthquake of 1923 or during the bombing of Tokyo in 1945.
55
National emblems framing the main picture on either side, such as the eagle
on the right, were replaced for the Japanese Jing banknote by the latest coin design
of 1871 by Kano Natsuo. The dragon on the right was to represent the Japanese
emperor, while the chrysanthemum and paulownia on the left verso of the coin as
well as the sun and moon on the banners symbolize both the emperor and Japan in
general. See Keiko Mashino, Meiji shoki kahei no zuz wo meguru shomondai:
Various Problems Concerning the Iconography of Early Meiji Coins, Bijutsushi 145
(October 1998): 32-45. As Mashino Keiko points out in this article, these national
emblems also served to create trust in the newly introduced paper notes, for the
otherwise inexpensive material of paper owes its credibility entirely to the imagery
and name of the issuing authority printed on its surface (Mashino, Meiji shoki kahei,
p. 32); though no portraits were ever depicted on Meiji-period coins.
56
The banknote was engraved by Frederick Girsch. On the front-left Benjamin
Franklin is shown drawing electricity from the sky by flying a kite, and the front-right
is decorated with Liberty on an eagle. This banknote was issued in various states of
the U.S. I am grateful to Catherine Eagleton, curator at the Coins Department of
the British Museum, who kindly provided this information.
57
For examples see Flacke, Mythen der Nationen.

Figure 2.13. Ten-dollar United States banknote, 8 19 cm, 1864; Bank of Japan, Currency Museum, Tokyo.

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woman warrior, and one of the main reasons for this choice may
have been that in Japanese historiography Empress Jing was seen
as the sole successful conqueror of foreign landsthus indicating the
Meiji governments aspiration to imitate Western colonialism. 58
Images and written accounts of female warriors in other cultures
served similar ends. Frances Joan of Arc (1412-1431) was one such
heroine. The central painting of the 1843 triptych The Life of Joan of
Arc by the German painter Hermann Anton Stilke (1803-1860) depicts a battling patriot who leads France to glorious victory over
England at the end of the Hundred Years War,59 and this too may
have been a model for the 1873 Jing banknote. Like the French
national heroine, Jing was conceived as a woman who dressed as
a male warrior to reinstate her countrys pride through victory
against the allegedly hostile Korean kingdoms. The reception of Joan
of Arc in Japan at this time is exemplified by an early womens rights
activist, Fukuda Hideko (1865-1927), who was referred to as Japans
Joan of Arc because in 1886 she had attemptedtogether with
like-minded members of the Liberal Party (Jiyt)to set up a reform
government in exilein of all places Korea. Fukuda was imprisoned
as a result.60

58
Accordingly, the passage preceding the depiction of Jings victory in the 1433
handscroll states, It was always possible to achieve a victory in battles against foreign countries, but it is unheard of that anyone except the empress should have
managed to subjugate and receive a pledge from an enemy country (Emakimonosh,
pp. 87-88).
Other images on banknotes issued in 1873 are similarly politically laden. They
include the prehistoric deity Susanoo; the victorious battle against the Mongol invaders of 1274 and 1281; Nitta Yoshisada (1301-1338) and Kojima Takanori (fl. early
fourteenth century), both loyal warriors of the imperial revivalist Emperor Go-Daigo; and landmarks of the new capital in Tokyo, namely, the castle and Nihonbashi
Bridge.
59
The painting (oil on canvas, 135 146 cm) is located in the National Hermitage, St Petersburg. The collection of essays edited by Hedwig Rckelein, Charlotte
Scholl-Glass and Maria E. Mller, Jeanne dArc oder Wie Geschichte eine Figur konstruiert
(Freiburg: Herder, 1996), deconstructs the myth-making surrounding Joan of Arcs
persona. Calling her Jeanne dArc (Joan of Arc) associates her with an Amazon
fighter, while referring to her as La Pucelle (The Maid) focuses on her service to
France and her victimization (Rckelein, Jeanne dArc, p. 10).
60
Newspapers picked up the comparison with Joan of Arc from a work on Fukudas life after her release from prison, and the phrase was repeated in a number of
later accounts. See Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 49.

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Another example is the Chinese Hua Mulan, who was celebrated

in an anonymous ballad (yuefu) dating to the fifth or sixth century.61
Dressed as a male warrior, she joins other soldiers in battle so as to
save her father from military conscription, only revealing her sexual
identity after her victorious homecoming. Subsequent to this first
pithy text version, Mulans narrative underwent a variety of transformations over the centuries. Among these adaptations was a Confucian story of filial piety and a tale of romantic love (which saw a
Disney film version in 1998); Mulan was also remembered as a
national heroine among young revolutionary women in early twentieth-century China.62
The decision to represent Jing in her role as commander-in-chief
just before a pivotal battle may have been interpreted as a comment
on the highly explosive political situation surrounding the Seikanron
debate, which came to a preliminary end in 1873, the very same
year in which the Jing ten-yen banknote was issued. Regional leaders in southwestern Japan had raised the specter of war with Korea
if it refused to lift a recently imposed trade ban and establish diplomatic relations with Japan. But Meiji government officials, who had
just returned from a trip to Europe and the United States, prevailed
in their desire for (momentary) peace. But government advisors were
split over the issue, and the crisis resulted in a number of assassinations, rebellions and ultimately full-blown civil war.63

61
A translation of this ballad is in Hans H. Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the
Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1976), pp. 68-72.
62
For details on the reception of the Mulan story, see Susan Mann, Myths of
Asian Womanhood, The Journal of Asian Studies 59:4 (November 2000), pp. 846-847.
Mulan was heralded as a central figure in the revolutionary visions of young Chinese women during the early twentieth centurytermed the Mulan complex by
Christina Gilmartin. The quote is in Mann, Myths of Asian Womanhood, p. 854.
See also Christina Kelly Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women,
Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995). In one version of the Hundred Beauties of famous women in Chinese
history, dated 1908, Mulan becomes, as Susan Mann aptly puts it, an emblem of
the new female citizen and a reproach to her contemporary counterparts who have
neglected their duty to the country. Interviews with Chinese women remembering
Mulan as a role model during their youth in the 1920s are recorded in Wang Zheng,
Women in Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 147, 225 ff.
63
More on this debate in Donald Calman, The Nature and Origins of Japanese Imperialism: A Reinterpretation of the Great Crisis of 1873 (London: Routledge, 1992).

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91

In February 1876, Japan imposed the Treaty of Ganghwa on the

Korean Joseon government, which finally forced the opening of three
Korean ports for trade; hence, two years later, an entirely different
image of Jing was needednamely one representative of modern
imperial Japan. Chiossone also designed the 500-yen national bonds
which were issued by the Japanese government in 1878 (Figure
2.14).64 In the previous year the finance minister kuma Shigenobu
(1838-1922) wrote that Jing served as an ideal figure for banknotes
because she had demanded gold and silver as tribute from Korea;
in kumas view, this precedent could heighten the respect for
money in contemporary Japan.65 kuma was echoing a memorandum sent him two months earlier by Tokun Rynosuke, head of
the Banknote Bureau:
We do not know the precise origins of currency in our country, but
the Nihongi says that during the rule of Empress Jing the Three Korean
Kingdoms sent gold and silver as tribute. I would therefore like to
defend against counterfeit by reproducing an imaginary portrait [of
the old deity] according to the old texts66

The design was introduced one year after the final domestic rebellion
in the southwest (Seinan sens) had been quelled. The new national
confidence of the Meiji government is evident in this image of Jing,
which lacks overt martial associations.
Jing is clothed in an imaginary prehistoric garb that defies traditional Japanese concepts of feminine beauty. A broad obi-belt delineates a white kimono, contrasting with the large, dark overcoat. Her
unruly hair is partially bound up into two topknots, she wears abundant jewelry including magatama beads, and she is barefoot.
Jings pose and gesture resemble that of a Western empress such
as Queen Victoria. But as the art historian Wakakuwa Midori points
out, the globe that Jing is pointing to with her right hand, and the
scroll in her left, are attributes rarely seen in the context of women
rulers.67 Instead, the scroll and globe were part of Christian iconog64
The official title on the bonds was Dai-Nihon teikoku seifu kigy ksai [Public bonds
to enhance the establishment of industries by the imperial government of Great
Japan]. See Fukunaga, Stamp Museum Catalogue, p. 67.
65
kuma Shigenobu in a letter to the Minister of the Right, Iwakura Tomomi
(1825-1883), which is dated 13 April 1877; see Kiyossne kenky, p. 55.
66
See kurash hyakunenshi, vol. 2, p. 61.
67
Wakakuwa, Kg no shz, p. 386.

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Figure 2.14. 500-yen bonds, designed and engraved by Edoardo Chiossone

(1833-1898), 1878, lithograph, 24.5 23 cm; Banknote and Postage Stamp Museum,
Tokyo. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp.
xvii-xxxii.

raphy, serving to represent Christ as savior, an image that had been

translated into the secular portraiture of European sovereigns ever
since the sixteenth century.
Jing sits on a throne floating over a landscape opening up to the
left. While peasants toil in the foreground, in the background are
featured the modern technological achievements of railways and
steamboats. These public bonds were destined to fund the burgeoning transportation industries, and with Jing towering over the Japanese countryside, the composition as a whole illustrates the slogan
dominating Japanese domestic policy in the 1870s and beyond

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93

fukoku kyhei, meaning a wealthy nation and a strong army.68 Her

stately, magisterial pose and prehistoric Japanese apparel contrasts
and yet is also consonant with a developing modernity brimming
with energy and velocity; in other words, the guardian deity of an
age-old Japan protects, endorses and presides over the advancement of modernity. Her twin historical roles as wife of an emperor
and as mother giving miraculous birth to another emperor is here
turned into a metaphor of mothering a rich, thriving, and modern
nation.
Comparable images of female rulers looking over a city or region
are abundant in the history of European paper-money design. However, as in the example of an 1860 ten-taler note from a private bank
in Pomerania, the woman is neither a mythical nor historical figure
like Empress Jing but an allegory, presumably of the city of Stettin
situated on the river Oder, which flows into the Baltic Sea. 69 We
may interpret the 1878 Japanese bond as a turning point in Jingimagery: devoid of narrative contexts or ritual associations (as in
votive tablets or gosekku paraphernalia), and without mentioning her
name, Jing now served as a female allegory of Japan in the images
issued by Meiji governmental officesimages that mirrored Western
models.
Jing as Supreme Commander
The Jing figure as imagined in officially endorsed history textbooks
of the Meiji era was in striking contrast to those early official images
of Jing on banknotes of the 1870s and 1880s. The subject of history
was introduced into Japanese primary schools in 1881 after promulgation of the Charter on Educational Principles for Primary
68
The slogan fukoku kyhei a wealthy nation and a strong armyderives from
the Chinese legalist slogan fuguo qiangbing, which according to Lon Vandermeersch
might have been coined by Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE) but was not universally accepted until the end of the Warring States period (c. 403-221 BCE). See Lon Vandermeersch, La formation du lgisme: Recherche sur la constitution dune philosophie politique
caracterristique de la Chine ancienne (Paris: cole Franaise dExtreme-Orient, 1965),
p. 74, fn. 2.
69
For an illustration of this banknote, see Heinz Fengler, Geschichte der deutschen
Notenbank vor Einfhrung der Mark-Whrung. Papiergeld der altdeutschen Staaten (Regenstauf:
Gietl-Verlag, 1992), p. 37; for more on female allegories on banknotes, see Hewitt,
Beauty and the Banknote, pp. 12-27.

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School (Shgakk kysoku mryo), and the earliest illustration of the

Jing legend was issued four years later.70 From that first picture of
1885, included in the Kokushi kiy (Bulletin of National History) (Figure 2.15) to the Dokusho kyhon (Reading Textbook) of 1904, Jing is
shown as supreme commander, subduing and humiliating the Korean
kings, who are compelled to bow before her authority. The tribute
Jing demands is standard fare in Jing iconography and is displayed
on a table separating Minister Takeuchi, Jing and her vassals from
the conquered Korean kings. The image expresses Japanese superiority over foreign countries in the past, thus giving an historical
sanction, as it were, to the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars
of 1894-1895 and 1904-1905 respectively. These illustrations epitomize the nation-state as defining itself in relation to its foreign
Other.
A second iconography of the Jing myth in history textbooks introduced quasi-scientific images such as maps to prove the historical
veracity of the Jing invasion and so as to acquaint the student with
Korean geography in relation to Japan. A portrait in the 1887 history textbook for primary school children, Shinsen shgaku rekishi,
shows a martial Jing in prehistoric clothes and set in an oval-shaped
medallion, thus echoing the banknote composition (Figure 2.16). Her
image overlaps with warships on the sea and it towers over a map
of Korea.
Like banknotes, history textbooks are a public, widely available
and influential medium. But the textbook images of Jing contrast
with those of the banknote design not only insofar as they targeted
a purely national audience, but because they were by nature a narrative and didactic medium. The textbooks continued to retell and
visualize the medieval narrative, reducing its imagery to Jing, the
victorious general, while overtly emphasizing her renewed significance against the backdrop of the Meiji nation-states colonial
aspirations.

70
School textbooks issued by the Ministry of Education started to appear on a
national level after compulsory education was introduced in 1872.

Figure 2.15. Bulletin of National History (Kokushi kiy), detail with a depiction of the victorious Jing receiving
tributes from the Korean Kings, woodblock-printed book, 1885; Waseda University Library, Tokyo.

representing meiji japan

95

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Figure 2.16. Newly edited History Textbook for Primary Schools (Shinsen shgaku rekishi),
detail with Jing, warships and a map of Korea, woodblock-printed book, 1887;
Waseda University Library, Tokyo.

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97

Jing and the Womens Rights Movement

As Chiba Kei contends, though, to honor women such as Jing could
also be an implicit vote for female emancipation, an explosive issue
at the time.71 Already in February 1875, in the journal Minkan zasshi
(Journal of the People), Tsuboi Senjir cited Jing as a precedent in
arguing for the equal rights of women:
There are sometimes women who actually surpass men. First of all,
there is the wife of Emperor Chai, Empress Jing, who invaded Korea
at the time. In later eras, women who composed poems and prose were
abundant. There is no necessary gap between the wisdom of men and
women; therefore, it is incorrect to worship men and despise women.72

This statement was reiterated by Kishida Toshiko (1863-1901), who

spearheaded the early womens rights movement. In her article
Appealing to my Sisters, published in May 1884, she writes that
famous women in history (including Amaterasu, Jing, and Murasaki
Shikibu) were proof that women were hardly inferior to men.73
A year earlier, in 1883, Jing was celebrated in a poem composed
for a proposed national anthem. The poem included the line, danshi
ni masaru gyo-seki wa, kami to mo kami yo Tarashihime (her august skills
surpassing those of men, deity oh deity, Tarashihime).74 In order to
scale back the offensive gender comparison, this line was altered by
Minister of Education Fukuoka Takachika (1835-1919) to read, Yo
ni mo kiyu naru on-kseki (an achievement seldom found in this world).
But regardless of the change, the poem was ultimately rejected for
the national anthem.75
Jing also featured prominently as a female warrior on the frontispiece designed by Ogata Gekk (1859-1920) for the 1885 inaugu-

71
Chiba Kei, Kan Hgai Hibo Kannon o yomu [Reading Kan Hgais Hibo
Kannon], in Ikeda Shinobu, ed., Kenryoku to shikaku hysh III [Power and visual representation III] (Chiba daigaku daigakuin shakai bunka kagaku kenkyka, 2003),
pp. 48-65, especially pp. 56-57.
72
Tsuboi Senjir, Joshi ni tsugeru fumi [A letter addressed to women], in
Minkan zasshi 9; quoted in Chiba, Kan Hgai, p. 57.
73
This article was published in the journal Jiy no akari [The lantern of freedom],
vol. 4. See Chiba, Kan Hgai, p. 55.
74
Okinaga Tarashihime is an alternative name for Jing.
75
Quoted in Chiba, Kan Hgai, p. 57.

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ral issue of Jogaku zasshi (Womens Education Magazine).76 Her image

resembles that in the 1885 Bulletin of National History and is crowned
by a short biography celebrating Jings military achievements for
the greater glory of Japan. Much as Hua Mulan did in late-Qing
China some years later, in this instance Jing serves as a role model
for young, educated women of Meiji Japan; that is, a figure to emulate in the way she placed all her physical and moral resources in
the service of her country.
Jing as Proxy for the Meiji Emperor and Empress
We need to probe further, however, if we are to explain fully why a
living male ruler (i.e. the Meiji emperor) should have been passed
over in favor of a prehistoric empress as embodying the new Japan
on her banknotes. The feminization of the Japanese national spirit
as exemplified in Japanese literary history is a trend in mid-Meiji
scholarly discourse. Based on nineteenth-century European literary
histories, which pretended to discern national characteristics in certain archetypal literary texts, the literary histories of Japan from the
1890s described Japanese literature and her mentality as elegant
and graceful (ybi).77 As Tomi Suzuki suggests, this characterization
of Japanese literaturewould persist in subsequent literary historiography and have a lasting impact on the general view of Japanese
literature as feminine.78
Jings personaabundant in a wide variety of narrative media
and pictorial contextsmight also have served as the perfect embodiment of a refined culture (bun) associated with femininity, while still
yet expressing a kind of heroicism and martial bravery (bu) that usually had masculine connotations. This combination of virtues was
perceived as imperative for any modern nation-state in the 1890s
and 1900s. In his Comprehensive History of the National Literature (1905),
the scholar of Heian-period literature Fujioka Sakutar (1870-1910)
felt bushid (the way of the warrior) to be the main factor in the recent
76

I am grateful to Wolfgang Schamoni for this reference.

Tomi Suzuki, Gender and Genre: Modern Literary Histories and Womens
Diary Literature, in Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics:
Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2000), pp. 74-75, 79.
78
Suzuki, Gender and Genre, p. 75.
77

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99

military successes of the Japanese nation, describing it as the essence

of Japanese thought, religion and ethics (Bushid wa waga kokumin
shis no seisui nari. Bushid wa Nihon kokumin no shky nari, dtoku nari).
At the same time, he saw the Heian period as one of cultural refinement (bun o ttobu) and as epitomizing respect for womenthis in
contrast to the Tokugawa period, understood by Fujioka as cherishing the martial arts (bu o ttobu) and promoting male culture. Fujioka
extended the list of these contrasting periods divergent characteristics, suggesting that their ultimately complementary elements should
determine the cultural path of Japan.79 Fujiokas positive evaluation
of Heian literature was contested in publications of the 1890s by
scholars such as Mikami Sanji (1865-1939) and Takatsu Kuwasabur
(1864-1921) who criticized the Heian period for its ostentation and
luxury.80 As an ancient heroine, Jing predated the ancient period
and embodied feminine virtues as well as masculine valor in both
elite and popular imagery and texts. In fact, it was only possible to
create a successful imaginary portrait of Jing based on this shared
social, visual and literary knowledge, Jing thus serving as the ideal
figurehead of the Japanese nation.
The Meiji era was no stranger to the phenomenon of a single
figure embodying both genders. In an effort to emulate Western
models, the young Meiji government attempted to create clear definitions of sexual difference. Among the tasks was determining the gender of sex-less Buddhist deities as well as that of the emperor. The
discussion surrounding the painting by Kano Hgai (1828-1888),
Hibo Kannon (Kannon, Mother of Mercy), is a case in point. A first painting dates to 1883 and a revised version was incomplete at the time
of the artists death in 1888.81 The bodhisattva Kannon floats on a
cloud suspended over a mountainous landscape while looking down
on a male infant encased in a translucent globe. The second version
of 1888 shows a more vaguely gendered Kannon with a less promi79
Fujioka Sakutar, Kokubungaku zenshi: Heianch hen I [Comprehensive history of
the national literature: The Heian period 1], Ty bunko vol. 198 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971 [1905]), pp. 3-9, particularly p. 8.
80
Mikami Sanji and Takatsu Kuwasabur, Nihon bungakushi [The history of Japanese literature] (Tokyo: Kinkd, 1890); see Thomas Keirstead, The Gendering
and Re-gendering of Medieval Japan, U.S.-Japan Womens Journal, English Supplement
9 (1995): 77-92, particularly 78-82; and Suzuki, Gender and Genre, pp. 74-79.
81
Doris Croissant, Das Geheimnis des Hibo Kannon, Asiatische Studien XLIV,
2, (1990): 349-378. See also the essay by Doris Croissant in this volume.

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nent beard and a more feminine pose, while the child has lost its
male genitalia. As art historian Chiba Kei and others have argued,
the second painting was understood in retrospectthat is, after the
death of Hgaias depicting a mother and child. This reading
resulted in the paintings title of hibo (Mother of Mercy), despite the
still visible beard and the traditionally ambiguous gender of bodhisattvas.82 Chiba interprets the painting in a number of ways, among
them as an illustration of the parent (i.e. father and mother)-child
relationship of the Meiji emperor to his people. Chiba quotes a government statement of 1869 referring to the emperor as the new
political leader: The Emperor is Japans father and mother [Nihonkoku
no fubo ni mashimaseba].83 Similarly, Jing was clearly featured as a
woman in Chiossones portraits; but as acutely present as the female
Jing narrative was in the public memory, her male qualities were
integral to the appraisal of her historic character.
At the same time, we may interpret Jings banknote image, in
Wakakuwa Midoris words, as a personification of the mother of
the nation. As such, Jing denotes a precedent and model for the
Meiji Empress Shken.84 The Meiji government followed Western
models to help foster the entirely new concept of a visibly monogamous emperor with one empress as his wife.85
The banknotes of the early 1880s anticipate the first photograph
of Empress Shken in Western dress. A photo taken by Maruki Riy
(1850-1923), Suzuki Shinichi II (1855/1859-1912), and Chiossone
in 1889 (Figure 2.17)which also marks the year of the constitutions
proclamationresulted in multiple copies in various media including
newspaper reproductions and lithographs like the hanging scroll in
Fig. 2.4. Despite the obvious differences inherent in a full-length
portrait, Empress Shken resembles Jing in a number of ways: the
monochrome background, her regal and poised expression with a
82
Chiba, Kan Hgai, p. 49; and Chiba Kei (translated by Ignacio Adriasola),
Deconstructing Kano Hogais Hibo Kannon (Kannon, Mother of Mercy), English
abstract of a talk delivered at the 9th International Interdisciplinary Congress on
Women, at Ewha Womens University, Seoul, Korea, 22 June 2005. The English
version is unpublished.
83
Shigeki Tyama, commentator, Tenn to kazoku [The emperor and aristocracy],
Nihon kindai shis taikei, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988), p. 28, as quoted in
Chiba, Deconstructing Kano Hogai, p. 3.
84
See Wakakuwa, Kg no shz, pp. 379-401.
85
Historically, emperors would be surrounded by a number of consorts.

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101

Figure 2.17. Maruki Riy (1850-1923), Suzuki Shinichi II (1855/1859-1912), and

Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898), Empress Shken, photograph, 1889; Meiji Shrine,
Tokyo.

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slight turning of her body to the left, and the low dcollet with the
three-tiered necklace. Even the mix of Western and Japanese decorations in the rooma rose in a vase, tablecloths and carpets on the
one hand, and Japanese handscrolls and a makie-lacquer box on the
other resonate with the western frame design and medallion format of Jings portrait and the Japanese emblems of the imperial
household, such as the paulownia.
Jing was also a perfect surrogate for Shken in that the Meiji
empress was unable to produce an heir, instead offering herself up
in service to the new Japanese nation-state.86 Jing, in a similar way,
held back the delivery of her baby boy for the sake of a victory
against the Korean kingdoms and the greater glory of the Japanese
imperial household. The depiction of Jing without her son jin is
therefore a significant choice of iconography for the banknotes of
the early Meiji years. Both empresses are featured as hybrid WesternJapanese mothers of the nation and model women.
Conclusion
We have analyzed three different interpretations of Jing imagery
on banknotes and bonds within a time span of ten years between
1873 and 1883 and against the backdrop of earlier Jing images
represented through a variety of media that had multitudinous receptions. It is obvious that the Jing image on banknotes was conceived
with an eye toward the international community. The first image of
1873 was created in the year Japan participated in a world fair
(Vienna) for the first time. In the process of preparing for this pivotal
event, there were many cultural and political discussions regarding
the best way of representing Japan to the worlds nation-states. 87 As
an historical figure associated with international traffic, Jing was
a deliberate choice as representative of the modern Meiji state in
this very year of 1873. Moreover, the relatively high denominations
86
I am indebted to Ikeda Shinobu for her suggestion to read Jings image in this
context.
87
Thus, for instance, the neologism bijutsu (fine arts) was created as a translation
of the two divergent German terms, Kunstgewerbe (arts and crafts) and Schne
Knste (fine arts); see Sat Dshin, Nihon bijutsu tanj: Kindai Nihon no kotoba to
senryaku [The birth of Japanese art: terminologies and strategies in modern Japan],
Kdansha sensho mechie 92 (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1996), pp. 34-41.

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103

of one, five and ten-yen notes bearing Jing designs were not used
on a daily basis but only in larger monetary transactions.88 The same
applies to the Jing stamp design of 1908. The affluent international
community residing in Japanese cities at the time was certainly one
of the main consumer groups of these notes, and their familiarity
with Western banknote designs may have been another reason to
feature a Western-style portrait on the new paper money.
But let us take a final look at the types of traditional Jing imagery
employed in the official visual strategies of Meiji Japan. The initial
1873 version (Figure 2.12) shows Jing as a belligerent war heroine
and emblematic of a Japanese imperial past that entertained colonial
ambitions. The composition not only echoes a banknote design celebrating the glorious European explorations of the Americas but
refers more generally to the political aims of a modern nation-state.
In contrast to earlier depictions on handscrolls and votive tablets,
the 1873 design derives from the new concept of a politically involved
imperial household. This notion informs the visible and more
dynamic figure of Jing about to lead her nation into a pivotal battle.
By contrast, earlier depictions of Jings forces attacking the Korean
warriorssuch as those on large votive tabletstypically represent
Jing as an imperial supreme commander hidden away in her ships
royal cabin while her army and deities are taking the active role of
combat warriors. Different from these earlier depictions, in which
she is shown as a general dressed as a man, the banknote presents
her as a Western Amazon replete with Western hairdo and long
white clothingmuch like Joan of Arc. Jings ambiguous gender in
the medieval narrative gives way to a clear pictorial definition of her
femininity.
As much as earlier depictions of Jing focus on her status as an
indigenous deityand sculptural icons of Jing continued to be worshiped at shrinesher image was controlled by a narrative that
defined her character within the context of advisors such as Minister
Takeuchi and her personal network of accompanying male deities
(Sumiyoshi, Kra, and most prominently her son jin, alias Hachiman). By contrast, the 1878 bonds (Figure 2.14) show her as an
88
In 1881, 10 kg. of rice cost 82 sen (100 sen = 1 yen), and 3.3 square meters of
land in the Ginza district of Tokyo cost 20 yen. See Uemura Takashi, Shihei shz no
rekishi [The history of portraits on paper money], Tokyo bijutsu sensho 59 (Tokyo:
Tokyo bijutsu, 1989), p. 88.

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independent, allegorical guardian deity of modernizing Japan, surveying the technological progress of a thriving young nation-state.
Again, her femininity is highlighted by means of her sartorial accoutrements, the lack of pictorial allusions to the martial plot of the Jing
legend, and the cross-reference with Western female allegories.
But while the 1878 bond emphasizes Jings Japaneseness, the
1881, 1882 and 1883 banknote designs (Figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3) are
based on European imperial portraiture depicting Jing as an empress
in a hybrid Western/Japanese guise. Devoid of any narrative associations, this imagery is without precedent in earlier popular depictions
of Jing. It was argued at the time that such an imaginary Westernstyle portrait in an oval medallion would protect the revised national
banknote from counterfeiters. Had Western precedents been strictly
followed, a head of state would have been featured on the new paper
money; but since the Meiji emperor could not be depicted, and
because Jing was said to have acquired foreign money, she was an
ideal substitute for a portrait of the Meiji emperor as well as one of
Empress Shken.89
All modern, official Jing images on banknotes, bonds and stamps
epitomized the ideal of continuity and progress as marks of an
advanced and civilized nation.90 The ancient goddess, cross-dressing
warrior and mother Jing was to represent the modern Meiji nationstate in its new guise. While acknowledging the modern palimpsests
of earlier Jing iconographies, I believe that Jing was so successful
as a pictorial representative of modern Japan because her multigendered persona embodied a repertoire of motifs serving diverse
meanings and objectives in the pre-Meiji era.

89

See the memorandum by the head of the Print Bureau, quoted above in fn.

90

See Suzuki, Gender and Genre, pp. 74, 78.

17.

the culturally contested student body

105

THE CULTURALLY CONTESTED STUDENT BODY:

N XUESHENG AT THE TURN
OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Joan Judge
Recently in Shanghai a kind of debauched woman (dangfu) who is
like a prostitute but not a prostitute (siji feiji) has appeared. These
women assume the dress of female students and incite liscentiousness throughout the city. . . This is most harmful to the future of
womens education.

Tuhua ribao, 1909

Historians of sexuality and historians of education are driven by different questions and situate their work in different academic discourses. The premise of this paper is that bridging this gap through
a cultural history of education and attention to the everyday historicity of the lives of female students is crucial to understanding shifting
gender norms and sexual practices in China at the turn of the twentieth century. These norms and practices were not only shaped
within the pleasure quarters or among members of the courtesan
class. They were deeply affected by the new possibilities that opened
up as young women attended public schools, studied abroad, and
established independent careers as teachers in the late Qing and
early Republican periods.
This chapter examines the historic challenge the turn-of-the-twentieth-century movement towards formalized education for girls and
women posed to Chinese principles of gender differentiation and
sexual normativity. From the ancient period these principles had
been reinforced by distinct male and female educational trajectories.
According to the Nei ze (Domestic regulations) section of the Li ji
(Record of rites), education would ensure gender separation and
reproduce gendered identities. While boys would leave home to
attend school at age ten, girls would remain in the household and
receive instruction in the womanly arts from female tutors (mu). 1 In
1

James Legge, trans., The Nei Tse: The Pattern of the Family, in Li Chi Book
of Rites: An Encyclopedia of Ancient Ceremonial Usages, Religious Creeds, and Social Institutions,

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joan judge

the following centuries, particularly in the late imperial period, many

elite young women were trained in much more than the Nei zes
restricted curriculum of proper feminine deportment, weaving, and
sewing. It was not until the first private schools for girls and women
were founded in the late nineteenth century, however, that the model
of education put forward in the Li ji was directly challenged.2
The ensuing early-twentieth-century debates over whether or not
these early educational developments should be encouraged, suppressed, or officially regulated by the Qing state took place in the
context of a radical reassessment of the merits of Confucian learning
and the increasing valorization of new wenming (progessive, and
often imported) ideas.3 The polemics surrounding womens education, thus, became one of the crucial sites where ritual teachings
(lijiao) fundamental to the Confucian moral universe collided with
new wenming values.
The self-appointed defenders of ritual teachings included lateQing officials and cultural conservatives. Committed to perpetuating
what they presented as eternal female virtues, they advocated restricting womens learning to those skills that had defined the correct
comportment of daughters, wives, and mothers since the ancient
Three Dynasties period. Despite its eternalizing rhetoric, however,
this strident defense of traditional female virtues was the product of
its specific historical context: of the push for womens public education inspired by wenming ideas, and of the emergence of the new social
category of n xuesheng (female student) which embodied these ideas.
Rather than serve as an impenetrable bulwark against wenming values,
the late-Qing lijiao discourse was constituted by them.
Official documents on the content and objectives of womens education were most explicitly centered on the question of female virtue.
As the epigraph to this paper suggests and as the following pages will
more fully assert, however, those with a stake in the new pedagogy
were as concerned with the sexuality of the female student as they
were with her morality. Their efforts to uphold ancient feminine
ed. Chuu Chai and Winberg Chai (New York: University Books, 1967), vol. 2,
pp. 478-479.
2
Missionaries had set up schools for girls and women in China from 1844 but
the first school established by Chinese was founded in 1898.
3
On these developments, see Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),
pp. 596-625.

the culturally contested student body

107

norms and maintain the principles of the late imperial regime of

feminine virtue masked more pressing anxieties about controlling
female sexual mores.4
This chapter explores four aspects of this sexuality/education
nexus at the turn of the twentieth century. Two were manifest on
the level of discourse. They include the profound gender and sexual
anxieties implicit in official documents on womens education and
the more explicit fears expressed in the press over the alleged merging of n xuesheng and prostitute in the public imaginary. The last two
aspects are manifest on the level of practice. They include the overseas student experience in Japan which contributed to changes in
Chinese gender norms, and the development of womens professional
and erotic autonomy through formal female education.
The Regime of Feminine Virtue and the New Educational Regime
In 1907, the year the Qing goverment sanctioned formal female
education, more than 420 girls schools were already in operation
throughout the country.5 Ye Haowu, an instructor at one of the first
and more prominent of these privately established schools, the Patriotic Girls School (Aiguo nxuexiao), described the mandate of the
new womens education in a lecture delivered in 1904. According to
Ye, this education would relieve women of the burden of thousands
of years of oppressive doctrine by introducing them to new wenming
ideas. It would also release them from dependency on immature and
servile men schooled in Confucianism (rujiao) by teaching them to
respect themselves.6
4

The late imperial regime of feminine virtue to which I will refer several times in
this paper is not a formal, legally-backed regime, but a normative one based on socially and historically generated principles of proper feminine conduct. I develop this
concept more fully in The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman
Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
5
Guangxu sanshisan nianfen Xuebu diyici jiaoyu tongji tubiao, in Zhongguo
jindai xuezhi shiliao [Historical materials on the modern Chinese educational system],
Jiaoyu kexue congshu [Compendium of sources on education], ed. Zhu Youhuan
(Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1983-1986), [hereafter XZSL], 2:2,
pp. 649-650. The provinces with the most schools were Zhili (121), Jiangsu (72), Sichuan (70), and Zhejiang (32).
6
Ye Haowu, Aiguo nxuexiao lunli jiaoxi Ye Haowu jun jiangyi [Lecture delivered by Patriotic Girls School ethics teacher Ye Haowu, Jingzhong ribao (21 April
1904), reprinted in XZSL, 2: 2, p. 625.

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The ancient lijiao teachings that Yao and other radical reformers
so harshly vilified were revered by late-Qing officials. The Education
Board (Xuebu) legitimized its historic decision to authorize formal
female schooling in 1907 by invoking age-old texts and precedents.7
In the preamble to the normal school regulations published on
March 8, 1907, the Board explained that the government had been
reluctant to sanction formal womens education despite mounting
social pressure and the mushrooming of privately founded girls
schools throughout the country. It was not until trusted authorities
had uncovered ancient textual and institutional evidence that supported the initiative that public female schooling was finally approved.8
All documents on womens education drafted both before and after
the 1907 memorials similarly appealed to ancient principles. They
proclaimed that female education had to maintain the age-old
emphasis on womens virtue, and uphold the proper ritual distinctions between female and male, inner (nei) and outer (wai), China
and the outside world.

7
On March 8 of that year, the Xuebu (Board of Education) published regulations for elementary and normal schools for girls and women. These included the
Xuebu zouding nzi xiaoxue tang zhangcheng, Education Board Memorial on
regulations for womens elementary schools, and the Xuebu zouding nzi shifan
xuetang zhangcheng zhe [Education Board Memorial on regulations for womens
normal schools]. For the regulations themselves, see Xuebu zouding nzi shifan
xuetang zhangcheng zhe [The Ministry of Educations memorial on the enactment
of regulations for womens normal schools], DaQing Guangxu xinfaling, dishisance, [New
laws under Emperor Guangxu of the Great Qing Dynasty, vol. 13, 1907 3.8: pp. 3540], reprinted in XZSL: 2, p. 668. On developments in female education at this time,
see Liao Xiuzhen, Qingmo nxue zai xuezhi shang de yanjin ji nzi xiaoxue jiaoyu
de fazhan, 1897-1911 [Late Qing womens education in the context of the evolution of the educational system and the development of womens elementary education, 1897-1911], in Zhongguo fun shilun wenji [Historical essays on Chinese womens
history], ed. Li Yu-ning, (Taipei, 1992), 2: pp. 224-227. On the importance of the
regulations of 1907, see Taga Akigor, comp., Kindai Chgoku kyiku-shi shiry, Shinmatsu-hen [Historical materials for modern Chinese education- late Qing] (Tokyo, 1972),
p. 73.
8
Xuebu zouding nzi shifan, p. 666. This search for ancient Chinese precedents was a classic move on the part of late-Qing intellectuals confronted with the
problem of cultural authority in the face of new Western knowledge. For a discussion
of this discourse on the Chinese sources of Western knowledge (Xixue Zhongyuan),
see Quan Hansheng, Qingmo de Xixue yuanchu Zhongguo shuo [The late-Qing
discourse on Western learning originating in China], Lingnan xuebao 4:2 (1935): 57102. This question of Chinese origins was usually made with reference to science but
was also homologous with other fields.

the culturally contested student body

109

The first late-Qing memorial to directly address the question of

schooling for girls and women was the Memorial on regulations for
early training schools and for education on household matters (Zouding mengyangyuan zhangcheng ji jiating jiaoyufa zhangcheng). Drafted by
two Han and one Manchu high official, Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909),
Zhang Boxi (1847-1907) and Rongqing (1854-1912), it was published
in 1904, the year Ye Haowu gave his lecture at the Patriotic Girls
School. Although Zhang Zhidong and Zhang Boxi were both at the
forefront of Chinas educational transformation at the turn of the
century, their new educational vision did not extend to womens
education. 9 Staunch defenders of eternal feminine values, Zhang,
Zhang, and Rongqing stated in the 1904 memorial that education
for girls and women should not include anything beyond the basic
instruction women had received since the ancient Three Dynasties.
This rudimentary knowledge would adequately prepare them for the
only roles deemed appropriate for women: managing their households, supporting their husbands, and educating their children. 10
Education Board officials went beyond the 1904 document when
they formally sanctioned the establishment of schools for girls and
women in 1907. They, nonetheless, maintained that ancient principles of feminine virtue first articulated in the Chinese classics and
histories were the fundamental basis for the new female education.
In the preamble to the regulations for womens normal schools, they
made specific reference to the uprightness of the wives of King Wen
in the Zhounan and Zhaonan poems of the Shijing (Book of odes).11
Although they included new forms of knowledge in their description
of female education, they repeatedly emphasized that this new knowledge had to be compatible with ritual doctrine on feminine virtue
9
Zhang Zhidong had been a moderate voice for educational reform from the
late 1890s. In 1898 he published his famous Quanxue pian [A plea for learning].
Zhang Zhidong and Zhang Boxi had both played instrumental roles in the dismantling of the civil service examination system, a process that was completed in 1905.
Their memorial on early training schools for girls was part of a larger proposal for a
new school system that would replace the previous examination-oriented system. For
Zhang Zhidongs role in dismantling the examination system, see Elman, pp. 590591.
10
Rongqing, Zhang Boxi, Zhang Zhidong, Zouding mengyangyuan zhangcheng
ji jiating jiaoyu fa zhangcheng [Memorial on regulations for kindergartens and for
methods of household education], (13 January 1904), reprinted in XZYB, p. 396.
11
Xuebu zouding nzi xiaoxue, p. 658; Xuebu zouding nzi shifan, pp. 668,
666.

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joan judge

(yimei zhi lijiao). The Education Board officials were as precise in

defining these ancient ethical teachings as they were vague about the
content of the new learning. In order to properly perform their roles
as daughters, wives, and mothers, they proclaimed, women had to
be sexually chaste (zhenjing), obedient (shunliang), compassionate (cishu),
and frugal (duanjian).12
The principle of gender separation was fundamental to the timehonored ritual teachings that the 1907 document emphasized. Zhang,
Zhang, and Rongqing had already expressed profound anxieties
about the compatibility of this ritual imperative with formal female
education in their 1904 memorial. They argued that proper distinctions between male and female, inner and outer, could only be maintained if womens instruction continued to be subsumed under the
category of education in the family (jiating jiaoyu). Instruction of young
women outside the household would be for the limited purpose of
training the primary care givers (baomu) who would be responsible
for pre-school-aged boys.13 Zhang, Zhang, and Rongqing did not
advocate the establishment of separate educational institutions to
train these pre-school teachers, however. Instead, they proposed that
proto-schools be grafted onto pre-existing social institutions at the
provincial, prefectural, sub-prefectural, and county levels. They specifically advocated using one of the mainstays of the late imperial
regime of feminine virtue, halls for revering chastity (jingjie tang or
xuli tang), as a site for these early training schools.14 Zhang, Zhang,
and Rongqing were confident that chaste widows living in seclusion
in the halls would not be corrupted by their teacher-training.15

12

Xuebu zouding nzi xiaoxue, p. 658; Xuebu zouding nzi shifan, pp. 667-

668.
13
Cong Xiaoping, Localizing the Global, Nationalizing the Local: The Role of
Teachers Schools in Making China Modern, 1897-1937 (unpublished Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Los Angeles, 2001), p. 90. One of the new initiatives in the
1904 school reform proposal was the establishment of kindergartens for young boys.
Zhang, Zhang, and Rongqing included women in their proposal only insofar as they
could serve as teachers or baomu for these preschool ages boys. Kindergarten education was a new addition of the 1904 system.
14
On the halls see Angela Ki Che Leung, To Chasten Society: The Development of Widow Homes in the Qing, 1773-1911, Late Imperial China 14:2 (December
1993): 1-32. The 1904 memorial also proposed using orphanages (yuyingtang) to the
same purpose.
15
Rongqing, Zhang Boxi, Zhang Zhidong, pp. 396-397.

the culturally contested student body

111

Some chaste widow homes did become primary care training centers both before and after the 1904 memorials publication. 16 Zhang,
Zhang, and Rongqings proposals were not implemented on a broad
scale, however, as the government could no longer ignore public
pressure to establish a formalized system of womens education that
went well beyond what the 1904 document proposed.17
Officials who initiated these calls for a more formalized system,
nonetheless upheld Zhang, Zhang, and Rongqings insistence on the
maintenance of gender separation in womens education. In 1906,
Liu Xun, an official in the Board of Public Works (Gongbu), submitted a memorial urging the court to publish official school regulations
that would enforce the separation of the sexes. These regulations
would clearly stipulate that only women could serve as instructors,
deans, and administrators in the new schools. If for some reason it
was necessary to employ a man, his duties would have to be strictly
circumscribed.18 The next year, the Education Board echoed Lius
proposal in specifying that all positions of authority in the newly
approved government schools had to be filled by women.19
In addition to insisting on the maintenance of gender separation,
Liu Xin, Zhang Zhidong and other defenders of the regime of virtue
explicitly addressed the need to uphold the division between the
inner and outer spheres. The 1904 memorial advocated restricting
female education to the home in order to avoid the risks involved in
allowing young girls to walk freely on the streets.20 While the authors
of the 1907 normal school regulations implicitly sanctioned the presence of young women in public by allowing the establishment of
16

Zhang Zhidong himself established a Jingjie xuetang (School for revering chastity) in Wuchang in 1904 with Japanese women serving as invited instructors and
some 100 chaste widows as students. Zhang chose to establish the widow home rather than attach a womans school to the existing Youzhi yuan (kindergarten) in Wuchang. Zhang Zhidong, Zha xuewuchu ban jingjie yuying xuetang [Document
concerning the establishment of schools in halls for revering chastity and orphanages
by Committees of Educational Affairs], in Zhang Wenxiang gong quanji, Gongdu, juan
25.
17
Even the Minister of the Education Board memorialized the central government on the issue of womens schools. Cong, pp. 117-126, on the Ministers memorial, pp. 118-119.
18
Gongbu zhushi Liu Xun xuewu yaoduan zhe [Manager of Affairs of the
Ministry of Public Works, Liu Xun, on important educational matters], Nanyang guanbao [Nanyang official gazette]: 54 (1906), reprinted in XZSL 2:2, p. 588.
19
Xuebu zouding nzi shifan, p. 673.
20
Rong Qing, Zhang Boxi, Zhang Zhidong, pp. 393-396.

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joan judge

formal girls schools, they attempted to limit the female students

degree of engagement with the outside world. They conceded, for
example, that male condescension towards their female counterparts
was wrong and that girls and women deserved to be properly treated
and educated. They, nonetheless, insisted that women did not have
the right to publicly demand social change: it was mens responsibility to initiate it.21
This repeated emphasis on maintaining the strict separation of
genders and spheres was defensive in tone, suggesting that these
authors were attempting to safeguard a regime already under assault
by what they perceived to be nefarious wenming influences. The drafters of the 1904 memorial explicitly stated that continued attention
to the ancient teachings was necessary to shield young women from
corrupt new ideas that would lead them to despise their parents
and husbands rather than revere and serve them.22 Liu Xun
exhorted his audience to eradicate new challenges to the moral order
such as the subversive claim that it was perverse for women to maintain their chastity and enlightened for them to lose it.23
These wenming values which Qing educational authorities were
determined to ward off were all imported from abroad or foreigninspired. Ironically, these same authorities were themselves profoundly influenced by Western and Japanese models of female
education. In 1906 Liu Xun wrote that universal schooling for young
girls was one of the foreign customs China urgently needed to adopt.24
The Empress Dowager Cixis (1835-1908) decision to sanction female
education in China was reached after she heard Governor-General
Duanfangs (1861-1911) report on constitutional systems abroad, and
after she learned of the achievements of the famous Japanese promoter of womens education, Shimoda Utako (1854-1936). While
the authors of the regulations that followed Cixis historic decision
cited ancient precedent in their preamble, they conceded that the
actual regulations which followed were based on Japanese, European, and American models.25

21
22
23
24
25

Xuebu zouding nzi shifan, p. 668.

Rongqing, Zhang Boxi, Zhang Zhidong, p. 396.
Gongbu, p. 587.
Gongbu, p. 587.
Xuebu zouding nzi shifan, p. 666.

the culturally contested student body

113

Acknowledged foreign influences aside, the authors of official Qing

documents on womens education depicted the West as a source
of social degradation. Western ideas and social practices thus became
the prime object of cultural differentiation in turn-of-the-twentiethcentury lijiao-inspired texts. Opposed and juxtaposed to ancient Chinese ritual principles, these foreign concepts gave time-worn
indigenous principles a new cultural vigor.
Zhang, Zhang, and Rongqings trepidation about female education was based on their fear that educated young women would start
to read and become corrupted by Western books.26 Liu Xun warned
against Europeanized approaches to Chinese womens education
which ignored the radical differences between Chinese and foreign
customs, and betrayed a reckless ignorance of Chinas own (low) level
of social development. He further asserted that the wild talk of
gender equality and free marriage imported from the West which
was filling Chinese newspapers would poison hearts and destroy
customs. Liu insisted that new schools had to refuse to propagate
harmful foreign ideas and expel any students who did so.27
The authors of the 1907 normal school regulations similarly
warned against imported wayward talk of free marriage which
blurred the distinction between the sexes.28 Education Board officials
also censured foreign-produced or foreign-inspired textbooks through
the Republican period. Specific new-style texts such as a Progressive
Press (Wenming shuju) songbook for girls, the Improved and
Reprinted Girls School Songs (Gailiang zaiban nxue changge) were
subject to government censure. Board authorities announced that
because the Progressive songbook promoted the idea of free marriage
it contravened both the newly published regulations for girls schools
(the censure of the songbook came one month after the school regulations had been announced) and established ritual teachings (weibei
lijiao). They requested that local educational bureaus ban any books
of this kind from schools and bookshops.29
26

Rong Qing, Zhang Boxi, Zhang Zhidong, pp. 393-396.

Gongbu, pp. 587-588.
28
Rongqing, Zhang Boxi, Zhang Zhidong, p. 396.
29
On the ban, see Zicha Nxue changge [Investigation of School songs for
girls], STSB (28 April 28 1907). For other newspaper reports on this incident, see
also, Paul Bailey, Unharnessed Fillies: Discourse on the Modern Female Student
in Early Twentieth Century China, in Voices Amid Silence (III): Women and the Culture
[sic] in Modern China (1600-1950), ed. Lo Jiu-jiung and Lu Miaw-fen (Taipei: Institute
27

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The Culturally Contested Student Body

Various official documents set the parameters for the implementation

of public schooling for girls and women at the turn of the twentieth
century. The everyday historicity of the new education rather than
the heightened rhetoric surrounding it is ultimately most revealing
of the complexity of cultural and social change in this period, however. As we have seen, guardians of the regime of virtue repeatedly
appealed to historical authority both in attempting to ward off new,
foreign-inspired conceptions of womens education and in legitimizing their own reluctant decision to endorse public female schooling.
The Education Board, nonetheless, conceded that the actual 1907
regulations for girls schools were based on Western and Japanese
models. And despite their repeated mantra that virtue was the essence
of womens education, the number of hours ultimately devoted to
ethics courses in the government-mandated school curriculums was
marginal: students were required to spend two out of twenty-four to
twenty-eight hours of class time at the lower elementary level, and
two out of thirty four hours at the normal school level in ethics
classes.30
The stridency with which individuals asserted the eternal value of
lijiao, thus, masked the unfolding materiality of womens education.
It further suggests that more was at stake in debates over female
schooling than the institutional configuration or even the ideological
objectives of womens education. Implicit in the condemnation of
women embracing new ideas of free marriage or even reading Western books were intense and widespread anxieties over the sexual
mores of the female student. Representing an unprecedented challenge to Chinese feminine mores, the new womens education accentuated ongoing tensions between normative sexual propriety and
social reality. It further blurred the already ambiguous gender dis-

of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003), p. 342. Most new-style textbooks extant
today did contain some discussion of free marriage, suggesting that these government
bans were less than effective.
30
Out of twenty-four to twenty-eight hours of class time at the lower elementary
level, and thirty-four hours at the normal school level, only two hours were devoted
to ethics courses. Xuebu zouding nzi xiaoxue, pp. 661-665; Xuebu zouding nzi
shifan, pp. 671-672.

the culturally contested student body

115

tinctions that the two millenia-long discourse on womens virtue had

repeatedly sought to clarify.
The epigraph to this chapter alludes to these tensions. The Tuhua
ribao article from which the citation was taken submitted that, by
sanctioning the presence of women in public, the new education had
allowed for the confusion of two social worlds which ritual strictures
had long sought to separate: the world of illicit sexual pleasure and
the world of respectable femininity. 31 One of the repeatedly voiced
criticisms of the new womens education in organs of the late-Qing
and early-Republican periodical press was that it allowed upright
students and licentious prostitutes (jin) to become indistinguishable.
As the Tuhua ribao reported, young women of ill repute imitated the
dress and demeanor of the increasingly visible students in order to
shamelessly carry on their own trade (Figure 3.1).32
The press also criticized students who willingly blurred the lines
between n xuesheng and jin themselves. The author of an article in
the Shanghai daily newswpaper, The Eastern Times (Shibao) in November 1910 complained that young women at the Gracious and Refined
Girls School (Huixiu n xuetang) in Shanghai had invited prostitutes
to play the principle roles in a public fund-raising play for the school.
Most egregiously, some twenty students joined the prostitutes in singing on stage near the end of the performance.33
The female students appearance (rong) was integral to this phenomenon of social blurring. One of the four womanly attributes and
the most public marker of social status in Chinese society, appropriate demeanor distinguished upright from fallen women, serious students from frivolous whores. Before the Education Board had
approved formal female education, principals of the first private
schools for girls and women, together with government officials and
cultural commentators, attempted to impose strict student dress
codes which emphasized modesty, simplicity, and respectability. The
31
Maochong nxuesheng zhi huangdan [The ridiculous practice of pretending
to be female students], Tuhua ribao (hereafter THRB) 27 (11 September 1909):
1-319.
32
Chang]chong nxuesheng zhi huangdan [The nonsense of assuming the
identity of female students], THRB #27 (11 September 1909). Other comments on
this phenomenon include Shanghai maiyin fu zhi chongshu [An increase in the
number of women selling sex in Shanghai], THRB #34 (18 September 1909).
33
N xuejie zhi guai xianzhuang [A strange phenomena involving female students], Shibao (21 November 1910).

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Figure 3.1. Maochong nxuesheng zhi huangkan [The ridiculous practice of pretending to be female students], THRB 27 (11 September 11 1909).

regulations for the Wuben Girls School (Wuben nshu) founded in

Shanghai in 1902, for example, stated that hats, shoes, clothing, and
pants had to be simple and refined. Natural-colored cotton was preferred and only white or light blue cotton was acceptable for unlined
clothing. Face powder, rouge, and jewelrytrademarks of the jin
were strictly forbidden.34
34
Wuben nxuexiao dierci gailiang guize [Second set of reformed regulations
for the Wuben Womens School], Zhili jiaoyu zazhi 1:17, pp. 35-49, reprinted in XZSL
2:2, p. 593. For examples of early articles calling for the regulation of female students dress, see Qing ding n xuesheng fuzhi [Petition to regulate female students
clothing], N jie xinwen, Beijing nbao (9 August 1906); N xuesheng ying you jun
fuzhi [Student clothing must be regulated], Shibao (18 August 1906). See also Qiu
Liu. Mofan zhi n xuesheng [The model female student], Shibao (13 December

the culturally contested student body

117

The 1907 girls school regulations included similar stipulations.

They required that instructors and students dress simply in long cotton jackets free of ornamentation and explicitly prohibited the adoption of Western-style clothing, white silk, and make-up. 35 These
regulations appear to have had little effect. The author of a 1913
article in a womens journal sharply criticized the dress of female
students in Shanghai who, he claimed, set sartorial standards for the
entire country. Progressive female students (wenming zhi n xuesheng)
wore outlandish and eye-catching (qili) clothing characteristic of prostitues, he complained. Who but the most sophisticated could tell the
difference between the two?36
The police were evidently among the less sophisticated, often
mistaking students for prostitutes and vise versa. In one example
from the early Republic, authorities in Anhui province arrested students in a normal school located near a brothel on the assumption
that they were streetwalkers.37
The dangerous and confusing slippage between students and prostitutes allegedly extended to the new schools themselves which critics
claimed served as fronts for illicit activities. From the establishment
of the first private girls schools in the early years of the twentieth
century, opponents of the new womens education declared that
these schools were actually fronts for gambling halls or brothels
(shuchang). In 1903, two county prefects from Changzhou called for
the prohibition of womens education on the grounds that schools
for girls and women in the area had become gambling dens, thus

1910), who claimed the model student dressed simply in home-made clothing without make-up or jewelry; N xueshi [Female students], Shibao (18 August 1910).
35
Xuebu zouding nzi shifan, p. 674.
36
Lun Shanghai n xuesheng zhi zhuangshu [The dress of Shanghai female
students], Fun shibao, 11 (20 October 1913): 12-13.
37
Shenbao (25 January 1913), cited in Bailey, Unharnassed Fillies, 16. The liminal status of the student/prostitute imbued the category of the nxuesheng with an
aura of eroticism that became the subject of pornographic fiction. Licentious works
that featured female students were repeatedly banned by the Ministry of Education
through the second decade of the twentieth century. Bailey, Unharnassed Fillies,
p. 16. The allegedly subversive nature of the womens school took on more political
overtones by the 1920s when womens schools often served as Communist Party
bases. Annping Chin writes that there is mounting evidence of such connections; see
her Four Sisters of Hofei, a history (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore:
Scribner, 2002), pp. 103-104. The Chinese Communist Party was ultimately founded in a girls school in Shanghai.

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joan judge

harming mores and destroying social customs (shangfeng baisu). 38

After 1907 grievances of this kind multiplied. An article in the popular pictorial press reported in 1909, for example, that a higher level
girls school set up by officials in a temple in Songjiang, had become
the site of the illicit mixing of the sexes (Figure 3.2).39
Some critics were concerned that female students were not only
involved in an illicit mixing but a perverse merging of the sexes.
Women were accused of varying degrees of masculinization. A member of the Hanlin Academy complained in a 1906 memorial on
reforming the clothing of n xuesheng that all female students wore
unfeminine short jackets and narrow pants (duanyi zhaiku).40 Other
critics faulted women for following the longstanding cross-dressing
practices of courtesans by cutting their hair and sporting trousers or
long gowns.41 The author of an article published in the Beijing Daily
(Beijing ribao) in 1910 lamented that women [imitate] men in everything today, not simply in their trousers but in their hats, shoes,
hairstyles, spectacles and cigarette-smoking.42 Some blamed this
cross-dressing trend on progressive theories of a great unity that
included unity of the sexes and inspired educated women to pose as
males (Figure 3.3).43
Female student dress that aped foreign-styles served as an alarming marker of the embrace of wenming values and also inspired commentary and attempted regulation. The Education Boards 1907
normal school statutes prohibited the adoption of Western-style
clothing as previously noted.44 This measure was apparently ineffective. In 1909, the Board re-emphasized the need to align the new
female students appearance with ancient Chinese ways (guli) and
38

Shijin nxue [Notice to ban womens schools], Shuntian shibao (11 June
1903).
39
Shuchang yu xuetang zhi guanxi [The relationship between schools and
brothels], THRB #130 (23 December 1909).
40
Qing ding n xuesheng fuzhi [Petition to regulate female students clothing],
N jie xinwen, Beijing nbao (9 August 1906).
41
See for example, Kan women nzi bei renjia chixiao [See how our women
are ridiculed], Dagong bao (27 June 1912), cited in Bailey, Unharnassed Fillies,
p. 352.
42
Beijing ribao (11 August 1910), cited in Weikun Cheng, Going Public Through
Education: Female Reformers and Girls Schools in Late Qing Beijing, Late Imperial
China 21: 1 (June 2000): 128.
43
Datong shijie zhi nan, THRB #66 (20 October 1909).
44
Xuebu zouding nzi shifan, p. 674.

the culturally contested student body

119

Figure 3.2. Shuchang yu xuetang zhi guanxi [The relationship between schools
and brothels], THRB 130 (23 December 23 1909).

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Figure 3.3. Datong shijie zhi nann [Males and females in a world of great unity],
THRB 66 (20 October 20 1909).

forbade students from adopting either Japanese or Western attire.

In attempting to enforce an appropriate dress code, the Board proposed that each school provide a uniform consisting of long garments, and appropriate footwear and headdress to be worn by
teachers, administrators, and students of the upper level (lower level
elementary students would continue to wear their own clothing). The
precise length of the uniforms was specified as was color: blue in
winter and spring, light blue in summer and fall.45 As the ongoing
disquisitions on the appearance of the n xuesheng well into the Re-

45

Xuebu zou zunni nxue fuse zhangcheng zhai [Memorial from the Education Board respectfully proposing regulations for dress in schools for girls and women], Shibao (26 January 1910).

the culturally contested student body

121

public reveal, this effort to formalize the students dress also went
unheeded.
The dynastic officials and cultural critics who attempted to regulate the too-foreign, too-masculine, and too-loose demeanor of female
students, sought to reinforce what they considered to be increasingly
compromised principles of gender differentiation. At the same time,
those like Ye Haowu introduced earlier in this essay, who were most
committed to the assimilation of wenming ideas, established a new
language of differentiation between a potently new present and a
moribund past. Just as repeated invocation of ancient history on the
part of the regimes defenders masked their engagement with wenming
values, however, so the violent repudiation of past teachings on the
part of the regimes challengers concealed a continued indebtedness
to those teachings.
Promoters of the new female education rhetorically dismissed the
authority of earlier female didactic texts based on lijiao, but continued
to uphold the importance of ethics as the foundation of womens
education, for example. While they explicitly endorsed a young
womans right to a public education and dismissed the harshest criticisms of female students as anti-wenming propaganda, they too
expressed concerns that the n xuesheng posed a threat to the Chinese
social order.
In 1910 two men active in the new education as teachers and
textbook authors, Zhuang Yu and Jiang Weiqiao, complained that
female students were too quickly abandoning established social mores
and family practices (jiushi jiating fengxi). Zhuang and Jiang did not
explicitly call for the containment of the behavior of educated young
women within the sphere of ancient ritual practice but within the
new categories of good wives and wise mothers (liangqi xianmu) and
mothers of citizens (guomin zhi mu).46 While the scope of feminine
virtue was broadened under these new rubrics to encompass not only
the familial but the social, national, and even global contexts, it
continued to be grounded in lijiao. These allegedly new feminine
categories ultimately reinforced the most basic principle of Chinese
gender ideology: a womans purpose in life was to serve. Even those
who proclaimed the increasing irrelevance of the regime of feminine
46

Zhuang Yu and Jiang Weiqiao, Zhi Nanyang Quanye hui yanjiu hui shu
[Letter to the Research Association of the Nanyang Association for the Promotion of
Vocations], Shibao (5 August 1910).

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virtue were thus unableand unwillingto uncategorically embrace

all the figure of the the n xuesheng had come to represent.
Crossing National Borders and Transgressing Gender Norms:
Female Overseas Study in Japan
The anxieties even reform-minded male elites expressed vis--vis the
n xuesheng suggest the constraints young women faced as they began
to attend public schools and gain access to delimited spheres of new
knowledge. The changes that ultimately had the greatest impact on
these womens lives had less to do with what they learned in the
classroom, however. They were more the result of the physical experience of attending a public school whether on the other side of their
home town, in a neighboring village, or, most dramatically, across
the East China Sea in Tokyo.
The female overseas study movement in Japan began in the first
years of the twentieth century. It was approved by the same officials
who would eventually sanction public female education in China
proper in 1907 and it was accompanied by a similar insistence on
the need to maintain fundamental gender norms. The unintended
consequences of studying thousands of miles from home at the epicenter of the Chinese radical nationalist movement were, however,
arguably more profound than the ramifications of public schooling
in China.
One of the reasons high Chinese officials allowed female overseas
study in Tokyo was because of their trust in the leading Japanese
female educator of the period, Shimoda Utako. The authors of the
1904 memorial on womens household education considered Shimoda to be the only foreigner whose teachings were compatible
with the Chinese way of womanhood. They even suggested including portions of a text Shimoda had written, Domestic Science
(Kaseigaku), in a textbook that would be principally a compilation
of excerpts from traditional Chinese female didactic works. 47 Shimoda was so favorably viewed by the highest late-Qing political
authorities that arrangements had been made for her to have an
audience with the Empress Dowager Cixi.48 Although Cixi died
47

Rongqing, Zhang Boxi, and Zhang Zhidong, pp. 393-396.

This was according to Hattori Unokichi who was well placed in Chinese official circles and a friend of Shimodas. Abe Hiroshi, Chgoku no kindai kyiku to Meiji
48

the culturally contested student body

123

before the encounter could take place, she had expressed the
wish that Shimoda establish a girls school in the Summer Palace
outside of Beijing. The Empress Dowagers own belated decision to
sanction female education had also been influenced by Shimodas
success as an educator.49
What was most attractive to Chinese officials and reformers about
Shimodas teachings was their dual emphasis on ancient ethical principles and new knowledge. For several generations, members of Shimodas family had been scholars of Chinese learning (kangaku) and
she herself had been trained in the Chinese classics and histories.50
She was devoted to both preserving Chinese learning and importing
the new knowledge necessary to strengthen the nations of East Asia
vis--vis the West, the same balance the Chinese authorities implicitly sought in their 1907 normal school regulations. According to one
commentator, Shimoda understood the importance of simultaneously
promoting womens education and preserving fundamental feminine
principles including filiality to in-laws, harmonious relations with
sisters-in-law, maritial compatibility, and maternal instruction. He
explained that while Shimoda had written a respected text on the
new education for women, Domestic Science, she continued to emphasize the importance of harmony, love, benevolence, and goodness.51
The support of these various Chinese authorities made it possible
for Shimoda to play the single most important role in educating
Chinese female overseas students in Japan from the year 1901. Both
the conceptual and the physical context for study at her Practical

Nihon [Modern Chinese education and Meiji Japan] (Tokyo: Fukumura shuppan,
1990), p. 102.
49
Hattori Unokichi recorded these details about the Empress Dowagers interest
in Shimoda. It was Hattoris private hope that the two women would meet, and he
even encouraged his wife Shigeko to learn Chinese so that she could serve as translator at the prospective meeting of the two heroic women. Ko Shimoda kch sensei
denki hensanjo, ed., Shimoda Utako sensei den [Biography of Professor Shimoda Utako],
(Tokyo: Ko Shimoda kch sensei denki hensanjo, 1943), pp. 415-416. See also Abe,
Chgoku, p. 102.
50
Huazu nxuexiao xuejian Xitian Gezi lun xing Zhongguo nxue shi [The
dean of the school for female nobles, Shimoda Utako, discusses the matter of promoting education in China], trans. Zhang Yingxu, transcr. Yang Du, Hunan youxue
yibian [Hunan overseas studies translations] 1 (12 November 1901), p. 9 [37].
51
Lun nxue yi zhuzhong deyu [Womens education should emphasize ethical
education], Dongfang zazhi 3:6 (1906): 119.

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joan judge

Womens School (Jissen jogakk) in Tokyo were compatible with

Chinese feminine norms. The students education was limited to the
domestic arts and early childhood education and the space the students inhabited in Tokyo was constructed as private space: Shimoda
insisted that students reside either with male relatives or in closely
supervised dormitories. In her address at the first graduation ceremony for Chinese students in 1904, Shimoda made it clear that the
cultivation of domestic skills, not politics, should be the primary
objective of the overseas study experience. Expressing concerns that
would be echoed in the 1907 Education Board regulations, she stated
that she did not want her students to become engaged in matters
outside of the school. Rather they should learn only what was necessary to become good wives and wise mothers (rysai kenbo).52
While Shimoda attempted to control the Chinese students from
the Japanese side of the East China Sea, Chinese authorities did
what they could from theirs. In 1910, the Education Board sent a
formal communication to governors of all provinces stating that the
singular purpose of female overseas study was to teach young women
the skills they would eventually need to instruct their own children.
New regulations published at this time stated that students sent to
study in Tokyo by their provincial governments had to be not only
intelligent, but, more importantly, obedient and virtuous. 53
Neither government regulations nor Shimodas vigilance could
stop young Chinese women from embracing the unprecedented
opportunities which life in Tokyo represented, however. These
opportunities were, in part, the product of the transgressive nature
of travel itself which invariably opened the individual up to new
personal, political, and cultural possibilities. This was particularly
true for Chinese women who continued to be held to rigorous standards of gender separation at the turn of the twentieth century.
Respectable women who were cautious about leaving the confines
of their homes or even the inner chambers were reluctant to depart
from China and expose themselves to foreign ways.54 This attitude
52

Ko Shimoda, pp. 399-400.

Xuebu shenzhong nsheng youxue [The Education Board is cautious about
female overseas study], Jiaoyu zazhi 2:8 (13 September 1910): 64.
54
Madame Jin in the novel Niehai hua was the quintessential example of a woman
who refused to leave China even in the company of her husband. On her refusal to
travel abroad, see Sun Shiyue, Zhongguo jindai nzi liuxue shi [The history of overseas
53

the culturally contested student body

125

began to change in the first years of the twentieth century when

provincial and dynastic authorities approved female overseas study,
thus sanctioning womens travel abroad for the first time in Chinese
history.55 The experience of the young women who participated in
this early initiative reveals that even the legitimate traversing of
national borders for explicitly educational purposes was potentially
subversive.
Wang Lian, who arrived in Tokyo in 1902 from Hubei Province,
described how crossing geographic borders facilitated crossing the
gender divide in a way that would not have been possible in China
proper. She recounted her journey from China to Japan in terms of
a gradual naturalization of her relations with men. At her first stop
in Hankou, she was uncomfortable with the idea of traveling with
male companions. By the time she got to Shanghai, she was a little
more accustomed to her male fellow travelers, and on the boat from
Shanghai to Kobe as she shared meals with male passengers and
allowed them to help her embark and disembark along the way, she
felt even more at ease. Once settled in Tokyo she was even less
conscious of gender differences. She viewed the ten or so friends of
both sexes who visited her every day like brothers and sisters who
treated each other with mutual respect and love. Wang contrasted
this feeling of naturalness with the barbarian Chinese custom of not
letting men and women see one another.56 When male students
from her native Hubei graduated from the Kbun Academy and the
Military Academy in Tokyo and were about to return to China in
1903, Wang gave a speech at their farewell gathering, demonstrating

study by Chinese women] ( Beijing: Zhongguo heping chuban she, 1995), pp. 27-28;
Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898-1918 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 36.
55
For a detailed discussion of these developments, see Judge, Between Nei andWai: Chinese Female Students in Japan in the Early Twentieth Century, in Gender
in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China, ed.
Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), pp. 121-143; Beyond Nationalism: Gender and the Chinese Student Experience in Japan in the Early 20th
Century, in Wusheng zhi sheng: Jindai Zhongguo de Fun yu Guojia [Voices Amid Silence
[I]: Women and the Culture in Modern China [1600-1950]], ed. Lo Chui-jung (Taipei: Institute for Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003), pp. 359-393.
56
Wang Lian, Tongxiang hui jishi: Hubei zhi bu [Record of native place association meeting, section on Hubei], Hubei xuesheng jie 2 (27 February 1903): 114115.

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joan judge

how integrated she had become into the broader community of overseas students.57
As Wang Lians speech honoring her male colleagues suggested,
men and women shared certain physical spaces in Tokyo, a reality
that contributed to the further transformation of gender relations
among this privileged group of Chinese women and men in the early
twentieth century. Female and male students freely interacted in
public spaces that were meeting grounds for the increasingly radicalized overseas community. One of the most common of these physical
sites was the Chinese Overseas Student Hall (Zhongguo liuxuesheng
huiguan). This two-story building founded in the Kanda section of
Tokyo in 1902 had a bank, bookstore, auditorium, and reception
hall on the first floor, and classrooms where Japanese language was
taught on the second floor.58 The revolutionary icon Qiu Jin (18751907) had attended Japanese classes, joined weekend discussion sessions, and frequently given lectures at the hall.59 Political meetings
attended by both men and women members of the overseas community, such as one organized in April 1903 to coordinate resistance
to the Russian advance in Manchuria, were also held there.60 Meetings of womens organizations were frequently held in this space as
well. The Association of Chinese Women Students in Japan (Zhongguo liu Ri n xuesheng hui) first met at the Student Hall on 23
September 23 1906.61 So did the 70 to 100 females who attended
the first meeting of the Study Society of Chinese Female Overseas
Students in Japan (Zhongguo liu Ri nxue hui) on 5 March 5
1911.62
Other shared public spaces included the Kinkikan where Sun
Zhongshan had given lectures and where the initial meeting of over
57

Wang Lian, p. 115.

On the huiguan, see Sanet Keish, Chgokujin Nihon rygaku-shi zho [A history
of Chinese students in Japan, enlarged edition], (Tokyo: Kuroshio shuppan, 1970),
pp. 195-203.
59
In the monthly journal she founded, the Baihua bao [Vernacular journal], Qiu
reported on debating sessions regularly held at the building on Sundays. Liu Mei
Ching, Forerunners of Chinese Feminism in Japan: Students Fighting for Freedom in Japan,
(Leiden: Doctoral Dissertation, 1988), pp. 291, 295.
60
Zhou Yichuan, Chgokujin josei Nihon rygaku shi kenky [Research on Chinese
female overseas students in Japan] (Tokyo: Kokusho kankkai, 2001), p. 67.
61
Ishii Yko, Shingai kakumeiki no ry-Nichi joshi gakusei [Female overseas
students in Japan in the era of the 1911 Revolution], Shiron 36 (1983): 44.
62
Zhou Yichuan, p. 88.
58

the culturally contested student body

127

500 overseas students protesting the Russian encroachment in Manchuria was held on 29 April 29 1903.63 Qiu Jin and probably other
women students also attended discussions at Kbun Academy where
Huang Xing (1874-1916) had organized a Doykai (Saturday Club)
for college students from Hunan. One of the lectures Qiu Jin delivered at the club was the famous Advice for the Two Hundred
Million Women of China (Jinggao Zhongguo erwanwan n tongbao)
which was published in the second issue of the Vernacular [Journal]
(Baihua) in October 1904.64 Qiu also gave an important speech at the
Fujimi building on December 5, 1905. In this speech, she encouraged female students to go on strike and leave their dormitories in
response to the Japanese governments Control Regulations (Torishimaru kisoku) which imposed increased restrictions on the Chinese
students in Tokyo.65 Given the positive response to this speech
seventeen students left the Jissen dormitory alonewe can surmise
that a number of women were in the audience.
In addition to formal meeting places, men and women had the
opportunity to meet informally in a variety of living spaces in Tokyo.
These included the relatively well-guarded womens dormitories
where the majority of the Chinese female overseas students lived. 66
Sakaki Mitoko (1883-1975), dormitory dean and teacher in the
Department of Chinese Overseas Students (Shina rygakusei bu) at
Shimoda Utakos Jissen school, recorded that the lights would go out
in the dormitory at nine oclock in the evening and that visitors of
any kind were strictly forbidden.67 While she maintained that most
of the young Chinese women at the school were well bred and
respected the regulations, she also noted that a number defied them
and allowed male guests into their rooms. As a result of these
encounters there had been a number of miscarriages among the

63

Sanet, pp. 164, 166; Zhou Yichuan, p. 66.

Liu Mei Ching, pp. 291, 295. Qius essay Jinggao Zhongguo erwanwan n
tongbao [Advice for the two hundred million women of China] was reprinted in
Qiu Jin xianlie wenji [The writings of the national martyr Qiu Jin] (Taipei: Dangshi
weiyuan hui, 1982), pp. 133-135.
65
Sanet, p. 473.
66
In 1909, for example, one of the peak years for female overseas study in Japan,
out of over 55 students at the Jissen school, 30 or so lived in the dormitory while 25
lived with family members. Ko Shimoda, p. 406.
67
Abe Hiroshi, p. 100.
64

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joan judge

students and one case of a woman dying in childbirth.68 Sakaki further indicated that it was not only difficult to keep male visitors out
of the dormitories, but to ensure that the female students stayed in.
She singled out Qiu Jin as the most recalcitrant in this regard. When
rumors that Qiu was involved with revolutionaries in Tokyo reached
the Jissen administration, school authorities considered the problem
serious enough to station a police box behind one of the school
buildings.69
Men and women also shared familial living spaces in Tokyo. In
many cases young women in these situations lived under the same
constraints they would have been subject to in China, their fate
remaining largely determined by their fathers, husbands, or elder
brothers.70 For other women, however, living outside of the dormitories meant tremendous freedom. He Xiangning, for example,
moved out of a school dormitory setting in 1903 and, with her husband Liao Zhongkai, rented rooms first in the Ushigome and then
the Koishikawa sections of Tokyo.71 Finally, at the request of Sun
Yat-sen, who hoped to use the Liao-He household as a front for his
revolutionary activities, the couple moved again to the Kanda area
where many of the overseas students lived. In their home in Kanda,
He Xiangning hosted and became acquainted with the radical students associated with Sun Yat-sen. She formally joined the Tongmeng hui (Revolutionary Alliance), the first woman to do so, in her
own household in 1905.72

68
Sakakis comments on this subject were understandably cryptic and other
sources of the period were, unfortunately, silent on this subject. Sakaki Mitsuko,
Sakaki Mitsuko-shi dan [A conversation with Ms. Sakaki Mitsuko], Jissen joshi
daigaku toshokan, Shimoda Utako kankei shiry [Jissen Womens University Library
materials related to Shimoda Utako, filed by number], file # 3001-1 (26 August
1968).
69
sato Hiraki, Nihonjin no mita Sh Kin: Sh Kin shijitsu no jakkan no saikent [Japanese views of Qiu Jin: A re-examination of a number of historical facts
concerning Qiu Jin], Chgoku kenky gepp 453 (November 1985): 15-16.
70
Zhou Yichuan, p. 62.
71
He Xiangning, Wo de huiyi [My reminiscences], in Xinhai geming huiyi lu
[Memoirs of the 1911 Revolution], vol. 1 ed. Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang
huiyi quanguo weiyuan hui, Wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuan hui (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao
chubanshe, 1981), p. 14.
72
He Xiangning, Wo de huiyi, pp. 15-20; When I Learned How to Cook, in
Li Yu-ning, ed., Chinese Women Through Chinese Eyes (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
1992), pp. 135-143.

the culturally contested student body

129

Conclusion: Female Education as a Source of Financial, Social, and

Erotic Autonomy
Many of the students who have been the main focus of this chapter
became teachers and school founders in the final years of the Qing
dynasty and the early years of the Republic. In this concluding section we will briefly examine the experiences of and perceptions of
these women who most fully embraced the unprecedented opportunities opened up by the new education. These teachers, who became
models for Chinese women, presaged an historic shift in womens
lives. Lu Lihua (1900-97), who was a school principal herself,
described the dramatic difference in the lives of women born in the
first years of the twentieth century as she was, versus those born just
five years earlier in the last years of the nineteenth. It was the opportunity to attend new-style girls schools, learn from new instructors/
models, and become professional teachers themselves, she maintained, which marked this crucial difference.73
Although the many new schools for Chinese women in the early
twentieth centuryprivate and public, in China and abroadvaried
in their ideological orientation, all prepared women for a new future.
All served as the potential training ground and site of employment
for young women who would enter the field of teaching, the most
broadly sanctioned and widely practiced female profession in the
early twentieth century. 74 An education, thus, not only signified
access to new bodies of knowledge but to a new mode of life exemplified by the Japanese teachers Chinese overseas students observed
in Tokyo and by the Western educators young Chinese women read
about in new-style journals.
The new Chinese teachers trained in this period were among
Chinas first independent career women. They enjoyed both personal
and financial autonomy as social, and no longer exclusively familial,
beings. Economically independent, they were released from the constraints of the thrice following (sancong) which defined the female
life-cycle in terms of successive stages of reliance on father, husband,
73

Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 165.
74
A number of vocations were tentatively opening up to women at this time, including sericulture, medicine, publishing, but teaching was the most important
among them. Wang Zheng, p. 130.

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joan judge

and son. Some womens teaching careers remained circumscribed

by their relationships with their husbands just as the writing careers
of most late imperial women authors had been mediated by fathers
or husbands. But for women who were, by choice or by fate, not
constrained by the matrimonial bond, teaching provided both income
and social status.
In the early Republic, young women trained and inspired by this
first generation of independent teachers would have increasing
opportunities to establish their independence from the patriarchal
familial order. The May Fourth writer Lu Yin (1895-1934) was able
to distance herself from her kin and finance her own college education by teaching in the inland provinces after graduating from a
teacher-training school in Beijing.75 Similarly, Lu Lihua saved enough
money to start a school by working at five teaching jobs after graduating from a womens gymnastics school in Shanghai.76 Chen Yongsheng (1900-97) remained single throughout her life, supporting
herself by teaching in various Chinese cities and provinces including
Beijing, Shanghai, Hubei, Guangdong, and Shandong, and even
outside of China, in Burma.77
While a career in education could free women from social and
financial dependence on fathers and husbands, it could also potentially liberate them from the bond between mother and son. Particularly in large early-twentieth century urban centers, teaching became
a sanctioned social alternative to the patriarchal and national imperative to produce male descendents. While society began to accept
women who chose teaching over motherhood at this time, however,
enduring familial and social structures did little to accommodate
women who may have wanted both. Women with families were
rarely able to sustain their teaching careers beyond the age of 25,
finding it almost impossible to balance child-rearing, household, and
teaching responsibilities, even with domestic help.78 Only childless
women like Chen and Lu were able to have life-long and successful
teaching careers.

75

Lu Yin, Lu Yin zizhuan [Autobiography of Lu Yin] (Shanghai: Diyi chubanshe,

1934). Cited in Cong, p. 382.
76
Wang Zheng, pp. 153-154.
77
Wang Zheng, pp. 259-286.
78
Cong, p. 222.

the culturally contested student body

131

In making the single life a viable alternative for women not committed to having children, careers in teaching also facilitated new
kinds of feminine romantic and erotic autonomy. Lu Lihua had two
brief marriages and a number of informal relationships. While her
romantic life was subject to humiliating social scrutiny, her teaching
career was never seriously impeded.79
More challenging to social norms than the alleged promiscuousness of independent career women like Li was female same-sex love.
At the turn of the twentieth century, this phenomenon was exclusively linked to the milieu of womens schools which allegedly fostered intimate relationships between female students, between female
students and teachers, or between female teachers. Discussions which
linked these unorthodox erotic practices to girls schooling revealed
broader anxieties about the threat womens education posed to the
existing economic and reproductive order.
The first article to address the subject of female same-sex love
appeared in The Womens Eastern Times (Fun shibao) in June of 1911.
Written by a certain Shan Zai and entitled Same-sex Love Among
Women (Fun tongxing zhi aiqing), the article presented female homoeroticism as abhorrent and foreshadowed a much more extensive
discussion of the relationship between education and same-sex love
less than a decade later.80 Shan Zai considered both nature and
nurture to be causes of female same-sex relations. He claimed that
some women were not physically attracted to men, others lacked
opportunities to meet men, and still others were merely perversely
curious about women. He then traced the history of female same-sex
love from ancient Greece and Rome through the medieval period,
and discussed its emergence in European and barbarian lands.
The context Shan Zai was most urgently concerned with, however,
was the contemporary Chinese female overseas student community
in Japan. He asserted that female same-sex love had become a pressing concern there and offered a number of tentative solutions to this
problem. These included abolishing dormitories for female students, keeping close friends in separate rooms, and educating young
79

Wang Zheng, pp. 183-184.

Shan Zai, Fun tongxing zhi aiqing [Same-sex love among women], Fun
shibao 7 (June 1911): 36-38. Tze-lan Sang discusses this article and a number of the
later articles in The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 99-126.
80

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joan judge

women about their desires. Ultimately, however, he advocated the

age-old solution to unseemly feminine behavior: strengthening womens moral character. The newly perceived threat posed by students
and teachers who refused to be enclosed and dependent as required
by the longstanding gender order, or to embrace Republican motherhood as exacted by the new national order, was met with a familiar appeal to the sacrosanct regime of feminine virtue.
As this fear of female same-sex love demonstrates, the nascent
womens culture which new-style womens education helped create
did not necessarily validate masculine notions of social or national
normativity despite the obsessive attention to womens virtue by government officials. Neither could it be subsumed by either lijiao principles or wenming state-building agendas. Instead it offered a new
feminine temporality that was neither cyclical and life-cycle-bound,
nor neatly synchronized with linear visions of national progress. This
new culture was still governed by what were deemed fundamental
feminine characteristics. Women teachers continued to serve society and they were devoted to educating and nurturing the next generation. That next generation was, however, no long exclusively
coded as male.

love martyrs and love cheaters

part two
WOMAN AS LITERARY METAPHOR

133

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keith mcmahon

love martyrs and love cheaters

135

LOVE MARTYRS AND LOVE CHEATERS AT THE END

OF THE CHINESE EMPIRE
Keith McMahon

Male subjection to female will is a core feature of fiction about prostitutes and male patrons in Shanghai brothels of the late Qing. The
most successful prostitute is the one who best manages to tap into
the patrons willingness to subject himself to her. She is a famous
figure in Shanghai guidebooks, newspapers, and fiction, all of which
promote an image of flashy urban sophistication via the aura of the
savvy and fashionable prostitute. Only a new kind of man, one who
can adjust to the modern urban scene, will deserve the attention of
this woman, who will otherwise make a fool of anyone who betrays
his lack of savoir-faire. Love becomes a cheating game in which
patron and prostitute live to cheat each other and avoid being
cheated by the other. No redemption is possible except when lovers
take a step back from flashy Shanghai and in a mode of classic sentimentality revert to older models of romantic heroes and heroines.
The male patron finally finds a kindred soul from the brothel and
together they join against a backdrop of general chaos and
degradation. One type of ending has them die a love-death as the
latter-day inheritors of a tradition of sublime love. In another type
of ending, they marry, after which the prostitute becomes a concubine
in the mans ancestral home, in which she virtuously subordinates
herself to the mans main wife.
The prostitutes effectiveness in the modern urban setting combines motifs of classical romance with the skills of doing business in
the foreign concessions of Shanghai. The love story of the late-Qing
1
On this topic, I have been especially inspired by the scholarship of Catherine
Yeh and Paola Zamperini; see Yeh, The Life-style of Four Wenren in Late Qing
Shanghai, in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57.2 (1997): 419-470; Reinventing
Ritual: Late Qing Handbooks for Proper Customer Behavior in Shanghai Courtesan
Houses, in Late Imperial China 19.2 (1998): 1-63; and Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2006), see also Zamperini, Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Late Qing Fiction
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, forthcoming).

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keith mcmahon

brothel must in general be read with a deep consideration of historical

roots, especially Ming and Qing motifs of heroic women and the
notion of qing. I translate qing as sublime passion, which reflects
the late-Ming scenario in which the supreme heroic figure is the
remarkable, talented woman. In Ming and Qing literature she takes
multiple forms: a courtesan, a talented daughter, an educated wife
or mother, or a valiant warrior woman. In talking about this figure
I am taking part in a recent discussion that in most succinct terms
is about women and the late-Qing transition to modernity. 2 If in its
most basic definition modernity means severance from tradition, then
my focus is on what cannot or will not be severed, or rhetorically
has not yet been severed. Qing and the remarkable woman are my
two rhetorical devices for delving into this continuity between the
late-Qing love story and its earlier Ming and Qing counterparts.
I define qing by first looking back at the most famous Chinese love
story since roughly the end of the eighteenth century, Dream of the
Red Chamber, which ends unhappily, resulting in the production of
numerous sequels attempting to repair the damage.3 Appearing
almost immediately after the first publication of the novel in the early
1790s, the sequels aspire to perfect what love and family life should
have been had the exquisite times of the original novel gone on
forever. The most singular gesture of repair takes the form of having
Baoyu become a successful polygynist by marrying both Baochai and
Daiyu as well as a number of other deserving remarkable women,
including maids. All cases feature some form of the polygynous man
subjecting himself to the will and pleasure of the women. In what
amounts to a kind of passive polygyny, the man becomes a polygynist
because the women want him to be one and think he deserves it. He
doesnt initiate it, they do. They pamper and coddle him, while he
accepts their decisions to add other women or not and to manage
his comings and goings. In between the lines we read the message
2
See, for example, Hu Ying, Re-Configuring Nei/Wai: Writing the Woman
Traveler in the Late Qing, in Late Imperial China 18.1 (1997): 72-99; Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000); and Joan Judge, Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, in Nan N: Men, Women, and
Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 102-135.
3
For detailed discussion of the sequels, see McMahon, Eliminating Traumatic
Antinomies, in Martin Huang, Snakes Legs: Sequels, Continuations, Rewritings, and Chinese Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), pp. 98-115.

love martyrs and love cheaters

137

that, if it werent for polygyny at the will of the women, then this
genteel man would turn into a worthless wastrel.
My point in bringing up Dream of the Red Chamber is to read lateQing lovers as versions of that novels central characters, Jia Baoyu
and Lin Daiyu, and in doing so to see them as taking part in a
romantic imaginary that juggles between the polygynous fantasy, on
the one hand, and the fantasy of just two lovers, on the other. The
polygynists fantasy takes ultimate form in the sequels just mentioned
in which polygyny becomes something the women want and manage.
The fantasy of two lovers, which is what Dream of the Red Chamber is
mainly about but not its sequels, presents the model of what I call
sublime passion. In the fantasy of two lovers, love in order to be true
cannot succeed. The closest it can come to success is a state that qing
scenarios since the late Ming repeatedly project, which features a
sense of equality and exchangeability between men and women. But
equality and exchangeability are ephemeral, as is the very sense of
self. Love is defined as a sublime state of union that is possible only
when two lovers miss the perfect moment. The qing scenario features
an inherent evanescence and reversibility of boundaries of status and
gender. Examples include the scenes in numerous novels in which
men and women gather to write poetry and in which seating
arrangements and appellations take no account of normal status
markers. The man is distinctly lesser in moral and spiritual stature
than the woman, in spite of his greater social privilege. In effect, the
man must become feminine in order to achieve a state of being that
the woman is more easily capable of achieving. That state of being
refers to a kind of magic transformation whereby the subject potentially arrives at a point of radical disconnectedness and therefore
radical potential. The transformation is especially significant in times
of personal and social crisis, hence its enhanced literary dramatization at the two times of the decadence and fall of the Ming and the
decadence and disintegration of the Qing.
The remarkable woman is the ideal subject in such situations. She
is the ultimate figure of qing subjectivity. She appears in both her
own writings and those of male writers throughout the Ming and
Qing to the very end of the dynasty. In general, these female voices
stage what amounts to a separate chorus which at its loudest shouts
with a voice that shakes the entire cosmos. A prime mythic figure of
this woman in late-Qing China is, interestingly enough, the cosmic

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woman Nwa, who appears in numerous novels including one that

carries her name in the title, The Stone of Goddess Nwa (Nwa shi,
1905). She is the woman who in primordial times repaired the sky
when it broke because of a fight between male giants. The mythic
frame of a sky broken and then fixed by a woman endures in fiction
to the end of the dynasty. The heroines of The Stone of Goddess Nwa
are prostitutes in a brothel that turns out to be a scientific utopia in
which women spurn sex with men, assassinate male leaders, and
force polygynists to liberate their concubines. The novels motto
appears in a quote from its preface: If women change, so will the
whole nation.
Repairing the sky when it breaks brings us right to the forefront
of the late-Qing love story, an outstanding example of which is the
1878 novel Tale of Filial Lovers (Ern yingxiong zhuan). In brief, Tale of
Filial Lovers is about the martial heroine, Thirteenth Sister, who
avenges her fathers wrongful death. She meets her future husband
when he is on his way to save his father. She proves her skill and
valor when she rescues the young man from cannibalistic monks,
then sets up the mans marriage with another young woman who
later convinces Thirteenth Sister that she must give up her martial
ways to become a co-wife of the young man. The novel perfects for
its late-Qing moment the fantasy of the coddled polygynist that
already began to play itself out in the sequels to Dream of the Red
Chamber. The fantasy of the coddled, dependent polygynist is one in
which the women, not the patriarch, are the real producers and
enforcers of the social law. Under that law, the polygynist enjoys the
pleasure of multiple wives who will never be jealous and who will
channel toward him a regular supply of pleasure while nevertheless
doing a perfect job of keeping him well-behaved. In the form of
Thirteenth Sister, the remarkable woman is stronger than all men
and enforces the law that men in general have become too weak or
evil to enforce. She is someone, in other words, who can repair the
sky. At the same time, she best assumes this role when she is a cowife in a polygynous marriage in which she is the dominant figure.
The novel is thus an excellent example of the use of the motif of the
remarkable woman as a kind of savior who functions to re-stabilize
the cultural order. Cultural restoration begins with the regeneration
of the healthy polygynous family. The polygynist in turn is a brilliant
exam candidate whose inherent physical weakness and practical

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139

ineptitude is considered a virtue that fits perfectly with the heroic

womans physical and moral strength.
The remarkable woman also appears in the late-Qing scenario
that features the love of one man and one woman, like the model
sublime lovers Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu. After the Opium War this
monogamous pair can only die the love-death of the martyrs of a
fallen civilization. They are sublime because they represent high
cultural integrity under threat of civilizational collapse. We see this
couple in two novels, Traces of the Flowery Moon (Huayue hen, 1864),
which was written during and after the catastrophe of the Taiping
Rebellion, and Shanghai Dust (Haishang chentian ying, 1897), which
appeared after the 1895 war with Japan in which the Qing
governments weakness became definitively apparent. The male hero
in both novels is still the standard coddled polygynist found elsewhere, but now is no longer able to resist the dissolution of polygynous pleasure that his relationship with the remarkable woman truly
demands. The heroes have in common their depression about
dynastic crisis and their correspondingly deep attachment to a young
courtesan who is the farthest possible from the figure of the conniving
and savvy prostitute. In Traces of the Flowery Moon, the lovers die during the chaos of the Taiping Rebellion, after which another set of
heroic love couples make a clean break and lead the Qing army to
victory. In Shanghai Dust, love-death is the only possible ending, but
not before the hero enjoys a final ephemeral moment of passive
polygyny with his two most beloved women. He symbolizes the last
Chinese polygynist, a figure that in turn symbolizes the fact that
polygyny cannot survive unless China survives. At the same time,
the novel declares that equality between men and women constitutes
the new regime and that China has historically been cruel to women
by forcing them into polygyny and not allowing them to be educated.
Hence the heroines final goal to establish a school for women on
the grounds of her brothel in the Shanghai concessions.
At the end of the Qing when China begins to undergo the drastic
transition to a newly cross-cultural symbolic order, what happens to
the notion of qing as I define it in terms of equality and the figures

For further discussion of this point, see McMahon, Cultural Destiny and Polygynous Love in Zou Taos Shanghai Dust, in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and
Reviews 27 (2005): 117-135.

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of radical subjectivity? The answer lies in the sense of freedom and

suspension inherent to the qing sensibility. A logical connection exists
between this sense of suspension and therefore pure possibility, on
the one hand, and the dislocation inherent in moments of social crisis
and decline. Pure possibility refers to the gap between the actual
and the possible, where actual is what is normal and prevalent but
in these moments ready to vanish or in need of radical change. The
possible is the new, the alternate, and that which in general the
actual and normal suppress, forget, or fail to realize.
Let us translate the leveling effects of the notion of pure possibility
into the historical terms of the last century of the Qing. By the time
of the Opium War in 1839-1842, the perception that the British and
other Western powers are a categorically different kind of enemy is
co-extensive with the sense of the senescence and corruption of the
Manchu empire.5 Many decades still have to pass before the selfconscious framing of China as a modern nation among nations,
which takes place at the end of the nineteenth century.6 At that time
modernity is defined by the framing of Chinas place in Asia and by
the general notion of China-in-the world. The leveling effects of
such a notion automatically imply the advent of a universal and
abstract global subject. As such, this is a subject hypothetically
deprived of all the particulars of culture, status, and gender.8 Here
is where the qing aesthetic forms a logical link with the discussion of
5
There are many ways of recording these perceptions, but see in particular the
poetry of Wei Yuan and Zhang Weiping (1780-1859) cited in Guo Yanli, Zhongguo
jindai wenxue fazhanshi (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 125, 161.
Also in Guo Yanli, see references to Lu Song (1791-1860), pp. 214-216, Lu Yitong
(1804-1863), p. 218, and Bei Qingqiao (1810-1863), pp. 225-227.
6
See Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth
Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), an excellent study of the idea that
China became thinkable as specifically national at the same time as, and only when,
China became consciously worldly (p.151), that is, at the turn of the nineteenth
century.
7
Such a framing also has to do with the incipient understanding of how imperialism worked to ideologically create its object. See Rebecca Karl, Staging the World,
p. 13 and 152.
8
Such a leveling effect demonstrates, in Terry Cochrans words, that the ethos
of modernity was born of a clash with the other; see Cochran, Twilight of the Literary:
Figures of Thought in the Age of Print (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),
p. 135. These points derive from Cochrans discussion of Kant and his world idea
as the conceptual framework of modernity. Cochran refers to Kants creation of
the modern science of man as an autonomous agent . . . derived from the idea of an
abstract human without local limitations (pp. 169 and 20).

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141

modernity and nationalism. Qing lurks as a locus in which we have

an analogous sense of the subjects radical dislocation. The displacement of the polygynist male that is figured in literature from the
late-Ming to the late-Qing involves the master signifier in a similar
position of yielding to an evanescent subject that is defined by the
terms of the feminine aesthetic of qing. That the remarkable woman,
in particular the courtesans of Traces of the Flowery Moon and Shanghai
Dust, still plays a major role in the late Qing proves this point,
especially in her evocation of the same concepts of radical freedom
and suspension from archaic norms. She embodies purity and transcendence, qualities that endow her with an ability to act decisively
and with utter disregard for material concerns. As different as the
vocabulary of modern nationalism is from that of the qing aesthetic,
she bridges the gap between the two formations by serving as the
figural representative of both spatial and temporal transition. She is,
in short, a crystallizing figure of the crisis and transformation of
traditional subjectivity.
I end with the figure of the savvy Shanghai prostitute, who emerges
in the last two decades of the Qing as a new female star and remarkable woman. She is remarkable not because of her literary talents
and traditional sensibilities, which have now become obsolete. She
is not a true heroine of the qing aesthetic, like the women in Traces
of the Flowery Moon and Shanghai Dust, although she often adopts
apparel, behavior, and nomenclature from that aesthetic by way of
selling herself as a famous prostitute (like the prostitutes who take
the name of Lin Daiyu, for example, both real and fictional). She is
remarkable because of her able adjustment to life in the newly modern city of Shanghai. She is especially skilled at fleecing her obsessed
male clients. She does so by surrounding herself with an aura upon
which she causes the male lover to prop himself as if she had the
very power to define him and call him into being. In an imaginary
sense she is the one who in effect steals him from his role in the
traditional patriarchy.9 In some contexts, she is designated as the one
who will be the most capable and efficienteven ruthlessin the
transition to modernity (as in the novel Niehai hua). Hence, for exam-

For a discussion of stealing the man from traditional patriarchy, see McMahon,
Fleecing the Male Customer in Shanghai Brothels of the1890s, in Late Imperial
China 23.2 (2002): 1-32.

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ple, the story of the woman who marries a client but refuses to return
with him to his patriarchal home in the provinces, or the woman
who, bored with being the mans concubine in the provinces,
absconds with his money and jewelry to return to a life of prostitution in Shanghai. The disharmony between patron and prostitute
has to do with the mans resentment of the heartless woman and
with the womans scorn for the man who thinks he can control
her.
From the prospect of the late Qing looking forward, what do these
characters turn into in later times? What forms will sexual agency
and pleasure take? What are the steps that men and women will take
in Republican China to imagine and actually try to live out egalitarian relationships? At this point, the received formulas are the polygynous fantasy and the affair of the mutually suspicious patron and
prostitute. There is also the affair of the love martyrs, that is, the
lovers who must by definition always miss the perfect moment. They
are already equal, so to speak, though not yet in the sense defined
by the new egalitarianism. They cannot yet bring their love into
reality. The relationship between the savvy prostitute and the brothel
fool is also a kind of egalitarianism, but it is a scorned and degraded
form of equality. The prostitute cannot shed the aura of baseness,
however dominant and powerful she becomes as an icon of modernity
and transition. Her assertion of sexual freedom and ability to choose
her sexual and romantic partners is more the sign of the mans defeat
than of the womans liberation. A popular late-Qing novel like Ninetimes Cuckold (Jiuwei gui, 1906-1910) counters the savvy prostitute by
inventing a modern Chinese man who sees through her wily ways
and re-asserts his ability to tame all promiscuous women. In his eyes,
the Chinese man proves his status as a modern international man
by his ability to tame the Shanghai prostitute. In short, the chief
questions to pose for the periods that follow are: In what forms will
the insistence on the primacy of polygynous pleasure persist after the
end of the Qing? With the erotic tradition known until then dismissed, and with the institution of polygamy and concubinage on its
way to being dismantled, what will become of the profound connection between polygamy, prostitution, and the structure of sexuality
in general? Or will that connection, as I suggest for future consideration, be overlooked and underplayed, and with what cost?

gender and formation of the modern literary field 143

GENDER AND FORMATION OF THE MODERN

LITERARY FIELD IN JAPAN: WOMEN AND THE
POSITION OF THE NOVEL, 1880s-1930s
Tomi Suzuki

In Japan, a newly implanted notion of literature (bungaku) emerged

at the end of nineteenth century as part of the modern nation-building process, alongside such newly defined fields of knowledge as science, political science, history, philosophy, and art. Two notions of
literature emerged at the same time: a broader notion of literature,
which, since the 1870s, meant a convergence of Confucian and
Western notions of the humanities, and a narrower, specialized
notion of literature, introduced from the mid-1880s and defined
primarily in terms of aesthetics (beauty, imagination, moral elevation)
and psychology (the human science dealing with emotion), both of
which were conceived in close relationship to transforming conceptions of gender and social relations and national identity.1 The two
1
(Place of publication in the footnotes is Tokyo, unless otherwise noted.) The
broader notion of literature as the humanities was reflected in the academic divisions
introduced when Tokyo University was established in 1877 (divisions of law, science,
medicine, and humanities). The division of the humanities (bungakubu) consisted of
two departments: 1) the department of history, philosophy, and political science (shigaku, tetsugaku, oyobi seijigaku), and 2) the department of wakan bungaku, or Japanese and
Chinese studies. The humanities were re-divided in 1881 into three departments: 1)
philosophy (tetsugaku), 2) political science and economics (seijigaku oyobi rizaigaku), and
3) Chinese and Japanese studies (wakan bungaku). In 1885, the department of political
science and economics was moved to the division of law and political science, and
the department of Chinese and Japanese studies was split into the department of
Japanese studies (wabun gakka) and the department of Chinese studies (kanbun gakka).
In 1886 Tokyo University became the Imperial University with five colleges: the
college of law, the college of medicine, the college of science, the college of engineering, and the college of humanitiesthe college of the humanities consisting of departments of philosophy, Japanese studies (wabun gakka), Chinese studies (kanbun
gakka), and linguistics/philology (hakugen gakka). In 1887, departments of history, English literature, and German literature were newly created and added; in 1888, Japanese history, which had been taught in the departments of Japanese and Chinese
studies, was offered as a course in the department of history, and in 1889 the department of national history (kokushi gakka) was newly created. At the same time, the department of Japanese studies was renamed kokubun gakka, or the department of

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notions of literature coexisted until the late 1900s, when, after the
end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the narrower notion of
literature as literary art rapidly assumed an autonomous cultural
statuswith the novel as its central genredifferentiating itself from
the earlier, broader notion of literature as humanities. It was at this
time that the so-called Japanese Naturalist writers and critics gained
a hegemonic literary position, supported by the authority of the
newly standardized and institutionalized genbun-itchi (unification of
spoken and written languages) modern colloquial written language,
which constituted the ideological foundation for the modern national
language. It was also in the mid-1900s that fin-de-sicle European
early modernismwith its emphasis on anti-utilitarian aestheticism
and subversion of established textual and sexual normsbegan to
inspire Japanese writers. Indeed, realism and modernism developed
almost simultaneously in Japan, and the discourse of modern Japanese literaturewhich actively contributed to representations of new
gender and social relationsassimilated, from the beginning of the
twentieth century, the discourse of literary modernism, which in
Europe emerged as a counter-discourse to bourgeois industrial
modernity, often taking a feminine position in opposition to
bourgeois masculinity. As I will show, the formation of the modern
field of literature was deeply related to changing conceptions of
gender, which worked as a powerful organizing metaphor in
constructing the discourse on literature, literary language, and
national identity in modern Japan.
The intricate interrelationship between the discursive formation
of modern Japanese literature and the formation of new gender conceptions had long-range implications for the formation of linguistic
and cultural identity. As a starting point, I will introduce a short
passage from Tanizaki Junichir (1886-1965)s essay On the Defects
national literature, thus separating literature and history (the department of
Chinese studies was renamed kangakka). Hasegawa Izumi, Kindai Nihon bungaku hyronshi
(Yseid, 1966), pp. 30-52; Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no bungaku gainen (Sakuhinsha, 1998);
Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Szsareta koten: Kanon keisei, kokumin kokka,
Nihon bungaku (Shinysha, 1999); Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the
Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). On the institutional establishment of kokubungaku, see Michael
Brownsteins pioneering article in English, From Kokugaku to Kokubungaku: CanonFormation in the Meiji Period, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47 (1987): 435-460.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 145

of the Modern Colloquial Written Style (Gendai kgobun no ketten ni
tsuite), which was published in 1929 and which later became part of
his widely-read Manual of Style (Bunsh dokuhon, 1934).
These days girls write essays and letters in a manner utterly indistinguishable from those of boys, and this seems to be based on a principle
taught at school. Since the equality of men and women does not mean
making women into men or annulling their beauty, and since the
Japanese language originally possessed gender distinctions, why should
we have to ruin this precious function of our national language? To
be frank, it would create interesting variations if women adopted a
style distinctly different from that of men even when they write more
high-level works such as novels and treatises . . . To repeat, this is
possible only in our Japanese language.2

Tanizaki here criticizes the artificial nature of the modern genbun-itchi

standard language, which he claims has linguistically homogenized
all subjects, erasing gender distinctions and masculinizing women.
He notes the complicit role that the modern novel has had in this
linguistic phenomenon and proposes to reevaluate the original
Japanese language (honrai no Nihongo), which he claims was capable
of reflecting various interpersonal subject positions, particularly gendered subject positions.
Mishima Yukio (1925-1970), responding to many of the claims
made in Tanizakis Manual of Style, wrote his own Manual of Style
(Bunsh dokuhon), which he published in 1959, in the post-Occupation
period.
The genuine Japanese language was written in kana, the basis of socalled feminine letters. The genuine Japanese classics consisted of
feminine literature written by women writers. This essential characteristic of Japanese literature has persisted up to the present and Japanese
literature can be summed up as being feminine . . . I imagine that in
Heian society, logic and emotions, or intellect and emotions, were
clearly divided between men and women respectively. Women represented feelings and emotions as well as the internal and private sphere
of life, whereas men represented logic and intellect as well as the external and public sphere of life. This division was deeply rooted in the

Tanizaki Junichir, Tanizaki Junichir zensh, vol. 20 (Ch kronsha, 1982),

p. 210. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. A very similar passage appears in Tanizakis Bunsh dokuhon, in Tanizaki Junichir zensh, vol. 21, p. 237.

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[essential] gender characteristics of the two sexes, and in the Heian
period different languages were used according to sexual difference. 3

Mishima argues that Japanese literature still tends to deal only with
the private, emotional life, partly due to the nineteenth-century
Romantic notion of literature, but mostly due to the nature of native
Japanese language and literature, which, he claims, originally lacked
masculine reason, logic, and the power of abstraction. The masculine
aspects of Japanese culture were always foreign imports, he laments.
Tanizaki describes the genbun-itchi modern standard language as
homogenizing all subjects and masculinizing women, whereas
Mishima characterizes Japanese language as feminizing (and castrating) men. Tanizakis interest as a novelist at this time (in the early
1930s) was to defamiliarize, historicize, and relativize the orthodox
genbun-itchi language (and literary conventions developed through this
language) by dramatizing linguistic gender differences and resuscitating what he claimed to be the disappearing feminine aspect of
Japanese language in order to explore new modernist fiction.
Mishima, by contrast, attempted to redress what he regarded as the
emasculation of Japanese language and literature by consciously dramatizing and valuing logic, abstraction, and intellectualization
which he associated with masculinityand implied that he intended
to achieve a Synthese of masculine ideas and feminine emotions in
his own writing.4
While Tanizaki emphasized the discontinuity between the modern
genbun-itchi language and the so-called genuine Japanese language,
and Mishima stressed the continuity between the two, they both
represented and mobilized larger gendered views of Japanese national
language and literature, views that had emerged from the late 1880s
and that were widely naturalized from the early twentieth century.
Indeed, we can observe a generative, mutually-forming relationship
between the terms by which Japanese language and literature, particularly the novel and its language, came to be defined from the
mid-1880s and the terms by which new gender relations were conceived. I argue that it was precisely the proximity of these terms that
3

Mishima Yukio, Ketteiban Mishima Yukio zensh, vol. 31 (Shinchsha, 2003),

pp. 19-20.
4
Mishima, Zensh, vol. 31, p. 63.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 147

first encouraged women to write novels from the late 1880s but that
later rendered most of the emergent and expanding body of women
writers invisible in the late 1900s, when the modern field of literature, particularly novel writing, was established as a respectable cultural field and when the prototypical narrative of modern Japanese
literary history as we now know it was constructed.
The Modern Novel and Women: The Essence of the Novel and
The Womens Journal
In the mid-1880s both the reform of fiction and the reform of
women began to be discussed seriously and widely.5 These currents
are represented by the publication in 1885 of Tsubouchi Shys
(1859-1935) The Essence of the Novel (Shsetsu shinzui), often considered
a manifesto of the modern novel; and the establishment of The
Womens Journal (Jogaku zasshi), a progressive Christian journal, which
started in 1885 and which provided the main forum for progressive
male and female intellectuals to discuss and promote the social and
cultural advancement of women. This occurred during the so-called
Rokumeikan period of radical westernization and reform. Shys
The Essence of the Novel argued that the position of the novel was an
important indicator of the nations level of civilization, and The
Womens Journal similarly argued that the position of women was a
key indicator of the nations level of civilization. Thus, the reform
of women and the reform of fiction were promoted as an integral
part of a larger reform movement in the mid- to late 1880s in an
attempt to redress the unequal treaties with the Western industrial
nations. The mid- to late 1880s was the time when political energy
5
While the reform of gender relations and the status of women were one of the
central concerns of the new nation builders from the early 1870s as seen in the debates developed in the progressive journal Meiroku zasshi (1874-1875), renewed attention was given to the reform of the status of women from the mid-1880s, as
exemplified by Fukuzawa Yukichis series of sustained discussions on women and
male-female relations, such as On Japanese Women (Nihon fujin ron, 1885) and On
Male-Female Relationships (Danjo-ksai ron, 1886). The status of women was widely
regarded as a marker of the level of civilization (this is what Sharon Sievers calls
one of the favored patriarchal myths of the nineteenth century West: that the status
of women was an important measure of any societys progress towards civilization.
Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1983).

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was redirected from the widespread popular rights movement to a

new stage of national consolidation, particularly through the cultural
sphere.
Soon after Shy argued that novel writing was a respectable and
important cultural form, educated and progressive women associated
with The Womens Journal began to write novels actively. I would like
to consider the emergence of these women novelists from the late
1880s and their subsequent disappearance, at least in the standard
literary histories, from the early 1900s. It was during this time that
Japanese Naturalist novelists and critics came to the fore together
with the institutionalization of the genbun-itchi standardized colloquial
language.
In The Essence of the Novel, Tsubouchi Shy argues that the most
advanced fiction, that is to say, the true novel, is neither a plaything for women and children nor vulgar and obscene entertainment;
instead it is a respectable, worthwhile cultural genre suited for educated men (taijin/gakushi).6 Women and children, a clich used since
the Edo period, function as a rhetorical figure to represent uneducated people, as opposed to cultured modern (mainly male) citizens
(although this metaphor could easily acquire a literal meaning
depending on usage). While the reform of fiction had been proposed
in the early 1880s in the political context of the Freedom and Peoples
Rights movement (in an attempt to disseminate new political ideals
widely), Shys Shsetsu shinzui emphasizes the autonomous cultural
value of the novel, severing its significance from direct political or
moral implications. Shy explains the cultural value of the novel in
terms of the value of Art (bijutsu), a recently imported Western notion,
the function of which Shy definesfollowing what Ernest Fenollosa
(1853-1908) proclaimed in his lecture entitled The Truth of Fine
Arts (Bijutsu shinsetsu, published only in Japanese translation in
1882)as elevating peoples mind and spirit through artistic and
emotional pleasure. Based on Herbert Spencers social Darwinism,
Shy traces the development of fiction (shsetsu) from mythology
to romance/fable/allegory to the novel and proclaims that the most
advanced, true novel is the realistic novel (mosha shsetsu) which
indiscriminately and minutely reveals as they are all aspects of
6
Tsubouchi Shy, Shsetsu shinzui, in Tsubouchi Shy sh, Nihon kindai bungaku
taikei 3 (Kadokawa shoten, 1974), pp. 83-84.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 149

human feelings in all sorts of peoplenot only of wise and virtuous
men but of old and young, male and female, good and evil people,
without being restrained by traditional didactic perspectives or by
preconceived ideals of the author.7
With his new emphasis on the private, affective world of contemporary everyday life, on the conflicting dark side of human nature,
particularly that of male-female relationships, Shys notion of the
most advanced novel presents a long-lasting aporia. The true novel
is a form of art that elevates peoples mind and spirit and that above
all detests obscenity,8 but it also minutely depicts the dark sides
of contemporary life, particularly of emotional life, without imposing
any didactic or idealistic moral views.
There are people who slander fiction (shsetsu) for inducing licentious
desire (kaiin dyoku) Chinese people criticized Jin ping mei (The Plum
Blossom in the Golden Vase), Roupu tuan (The Carnal Prayer Mat), and
the like as licentious books, and our people have blamed tales (monogatari)
for corrupting morals, no doubt referring to erotic books (jshi) that
depict the base passions of men and women in a vulgar and obscene
fashion. Such blame is indeed understandable, but these books are not
true novels, because they contain the obscene elements that are most
detested in Art . . .The love stories of men and women are the most
fundamental subject matter, since the affection called love [airen to iu
jai] is the most central human emotion. The true novel therefore deals
with love between a man and a woman as its primary subject, but it
never tries to depict unspeakably obscene manners like the epigones
of Tamenaga Shunsui. The true novel simply exposes the hidden
secrets of human feelings and reveals human psychology, as explained
by psychologists.9

Shy draws a fine line between obscene and vulgar fiction, which
induces base and licentious desire, and the realistic artistic novel,
which deals with love (airen, a neologism and translation of the
Western word love) and encourages reflection on the meaning of
life. Here Shy mixes the Confucian condemnation of licentiousness,
the Victorian view of sexuality (with its division between base,
7
Shsetsu shinzui, pp. 69-70. Shys central view of the most advanced form of
the novel is embodied in his key term, the artistic novel, which is defined as the
realistic novel, and which is contrasted with the less advanced kind of didactic
novel, to which, Shy claims, most of the best Japanese fiction since that of Takizawa (Kyokutei) Bakin belongs.
8
Shsetsu shinzui, pp. 74, 87.
9
Shsetsu shinzui, pp. 86-88.

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carnal desire and pure, spiritual love), and modern psychology

(with its emphasis on the significance of conflicting desires and
passions)a mixture that was shared by many of his Westerneducated contemporaries, including Iwamoto Yoshiharu, the leader
of The Womens Journal.
Shys notion of the artistic novel (which is defined as a realistic novel, the central focus of which is human emotions, particularly
male-female affective relationships) is also reflected in his discussion
of literary language. Following the Edo-period fiction writer Takizawa (Kyokutei) Bakins earlier discussion of literary language
which was formulated under the discursive influence of Ming and
Qing Chinese vernacular fictionShy classifies literary languages
into three styles: 1) gabuntai, a gentle and elegant classical style, 2)
zokubuntai, a lively colloquial style, and 3) gazoku-setchtai, an amalgamation of the elegant and colloquial styles. Shy points to
the limitation of the elegant style, which he says cannot depict fervent feelings, heroic actions, or grand and sublime states. 10 In contradistinction to elegant gabun, Shy values the clarity and vigor
of the zokubun style for its potential to portray vividly contemporary
manners, but he emphasizes that, due to the great distance between
the spoken and written languages, the actual spoken language, which
tends to be vulgar and unrefined, cannot be used in an artistic
novel except in dialogue. Although the colloquial style should be
used for realistic representation of speech, particularly that of lowerclass characters, the prose description of the novel must be written
in gazoku-setch style, an appropriate blend of the elegant and colloquial styles, Shy claims.11
It is noteworthy that Shy perceived the colloquial language in
Japan as being an amalgamation of yamato-kotoba (words of Japanese
origin), kango (Chinese diction), and local dialects. While he clearly
associated yamato-kotoba with elegant beauty and kango with majestic
grandeur, following the traditional views of yamato-kotoba and kango,

10
Based on the notion of belles-lettres in Shji oyobi kabun (1879), Kikuchi Dairokus translation of Rhetoric and Belles-Letters, in William and Robert Chambers, eds., Information for the People (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1848, 1849), Shy
explains that sublimity, beauty, pathos, and ludicrousnessthese are essential elements of belles-letters (kabun), particularly indispensable for the language of the novel (Shsetsu shinzui, p. 102).
11
Shsetsu shinzui, the Buntairon [On styles] section, pp. 101-129.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 151

Shy did not classify them by national or gender categories but
regarded them as different styles and rhetorical elements to be used
for describing different states and modes of human affairs, characters,
and feelings. Indeed, he promoted an updated combination of the
elegant and colloquial styles for the narrative and descriptive parts
of the novel because of its versatility and ability to depict all aspects
of lifefrom the noble to the low, from the refined to the vulgar,
from elegant beauty to grand magnificencethe kind of comprehensive coverage that Shy considered essential for an artistic and
realistic modern novel.12
Similar issues emerged from The Womens Journal, which was established in 1885 and led by the progressive Christian educator Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863-1942).13 Jogaku zasshi, supported by a wide
range of male and female intellectuals, promoted from 1886 a newly
defined notion of the novel. The journal criticized traditional Japanese womens roles, attempted to explore new gender relations, and
promoted womens social advancement, discussing gendered faculties
and social roles.
Emphasizing that women should develop certain specialized skills
in order to achieve independence, Iwamoto noted that although
women might not compare with men in philosophy or engineering,

12
Shys prescription for an updated combination style was to use more of the
colloquial style than found in Takizawa Bakins high-toned yomihon, which was being
commonly used in Meiji political fiction and translated fiction, and more kango than
found in the more colloquial kusazshi-style of late Edo low-brow vernacular ninjbon
and kokkeibon, which, Shy explains, did not use much kango because they were
meant for women and children. It is curious, however, that Shy equates gabun
with wabun when his notion of gazoku-setch style in fact is continuous with Bakins
notion of gazoku-setch (high-low mixed style)which derived from the discourse of
Ming- and Qing-period vernacular fictionin which gabun included both wabunbased and kanbun-based high styles.
13
Jogaku zasshi was founded in July 1885 with Kond Kenz as a chief editor, but
with the sudden death of Kond in May 1886 Iwamoto Yoshiharu became the sole
editor until the magazines end in 1904. For earlier studies on Jogaku zasshi and early
Meiji women writers, see Wada Shigejir, Meiji zenki jory sakuhin ron (fsha, 1989);
Seki Reiko, Kataru onnatachi no jidai: Ichiy to Meiji josei hygen (Shinysha, 1997); Hirata Yumi, Josei hygen no meijishi: Ichiy izen (Iwanami shoten, 1999); and Rebecca
Copelands pioneering English-language book, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000). My discussion of Iwamotos views
of the novel and women pays new attention to his shifting views of the novel within
the 1880s-1900 discursive context.

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they were fully suited for writing a novel or history.14 In an essay

called Women and the Novel (Nyoshi to shsetsu, June-August
1886),15 Iwamoto argued that women are suited for all forms of art
painting, music, theatre, and the novel. According to Iwamoto, the
essential qualities required for a novelist are the powers of imagination (szryoku), observation (kansatsuryoku), and sensitivity/emotional
capacity (kakuchiryoku, kand no kokoro). Although men excel in imagining the sublime, women are superior in imagining and penetrating
the hidden and subtle aspects of changing human emotions, which
was the essential task of the novelist. Women have been regarded as
narrow in scope in regard to observation, but this derives from a
lack of education. The determining factor is education, not natural
gender difference. As for sensitivity and emotional capacity, women
surpass men by far: In the West women are called people of emotion (kand no hito), and in our country they say that those who have
great emotional capacity are like women (onna no gotoshi).16
Both in Japan and in the West, there have rarely been women who
surpassed men in philosophy or science, but there have been a number
of women novelists, most notably [prominent Heian court women writers in Japan] Murasaki Shikibu who wrote The Tale of Genji, Sei Shnagon who wrote The Pillow Book, Lady Ise who wrote The Tale of Ise, Nun
Abutsu who wrote The Izayoi Diary, Akazomeemon who wrote The Tale
of Flowering Fortunes, Ben no Tsubone who wrote The Tale of Sagoromo,
the Mother of Captain Michitsuna who wrote The Kager Diary, and
Ono no Ots who wrote The Tale of Jruri. In the West, women writers
such as George Eliot, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Oliphant, Hannah More, and George Sandit is as if they all outshine
men.17

Iwamoto thus encourages educated women to write good novels,

particularly for women, novels that address womens issues and concerns not yet raised by recent male novelists.
In the fall of 1887, in an article Women and Writing as Profession
(Joshi to bunpitsu no gy, October 1887), Iwamoto emphasized in a
similar manner womens suitability and aptitude for writing due to
14
Iwamoto Yoshiharu, Onna wa hitotsu no gigei arubeki koto, Jogaku zasshi,
Issue 12 (January 15, 1886). The reprints of the entire Jogaku zasshi issues were published in 1966-1967 by Rinsen Shoten.
15
The essay was published in three installments in Issues 27 (June 25, 1886), 29
(July 15, 1886), and 32 (August 15, 1886).
16
Jogaku zasshi, Issue 32 (August 15, 1886): 23.
17
Jogaku zasshi, Issue 32 (August 15, 1886): 23.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 153

their general potential in emotional capacity and rich artistic
imagination and recommended writing as one of womens most
productive professions.18 While Iwamoto considers the home to be
womens important social domainmanaging the household, helping
the husband, and educating the children are emphasized as important
social tasks for womenhe encourages women to use their talent in
writing and contribute to society through their moral influence.
Iwamoto particularly urges the appearance of women journalists who
will discuss womens real concerns and issues such as womens
education.19 At the same time, in another essay written in the fall of
1887 called On the Novel (Shsetsuron, October-November 1887),20
Iwamoto notes that this year, 1887, was marked by the unprecedented popularity of the novel in contrast to the previous period, the
time around 1880-1881, which was marked by political debates and
zeal regarding popular rights. Considering the widespread popularity
of the novel and its capacity to affect people (emotionally susceptible
women and children in particular), Iwamoto feels the necessity to
articulate clearly the proper standards for the genuine novel. Extending and revising Shys evolutionist views of the novel, Iwamoto
explains that the realistic novel, which helps people understand the
real world, is the most advanced form of fiction. While naming
Shys own fiction Manners and Lives of Contemporary Students (Tsei
shosei katagi, 1885-86) and Mirror of Marriage (Imo to se kagami, 1886),
and Futabatei Shimeis Drifting Clouds (Ukigumo, 1887-1889)all of
which address new male-female relationshipsas good examples of
so-called genuine novels (junsui no shsetsu), however, Iwamoto
18
Jogaku zasshi, Issues 79 (October 8, 1887) and 80 (October 15, 1887). In this
essay, he cites a Western critic referred to as Wilson for saying Shakespeare depicted mostly mens feelings; it was none other than a woman novelist, George Eliot,
who successfully penetrated womens bodies and expressed the complex innermost
feelings and thoughts of women, which tend to turn inward and are hard to see from
outside (Issue 80, p. 182).
19
He notes the restricting newspaper regulations that currently prevented women from being the chief editors or publishers of newspapers and journals, but at this
point expresses a pragmatic hope for changing such regulations and laws step by
step. It is noteworthy that Iwamoto indeed appointed Shimizu Toyoko (Shikin) as a
chief editor of Jogaku zasshi in 1890, even when laws of gender inequality had been
decisively tightened by the newly established constitution, election law, and the laws
that prevented women from attending any political groups or gatherings.
20
Jogaku zasshi, Issues 82 (October 29, 1887), 83 (November 5, 1887), and 84
(November 12, 1887).

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cannot help expressing his dissatisfaction with the fact that the characters of such genuine novels as Manners and Lives of Contemporary
Students only depict petty students who indulge in carnal pleasures. 21
In an earlier essay written in 1885 called The Position of Women
(Fujin no chii, August-September 1885), Iwamoto pointed to three
stages of civilization: the first stage was the barbarous time of lust;
the second stage was the half-civilized time of foolish passion; the
third stage was the civilized time of love, of spiritual companionship
between man and woman.22 In principle, Iwamoto recognized the
value of the realistic novel, but he was increasingly ambivalent about
the actual examples of new fiction, which appeared to him to occupy
the second stage of foolish passion if not the first stage of barbarous
lust.
Iwamotos sense of dissatisfaction further intensified in 1889. In
an essay called Ideals of Writing (Bunshj no ris, March 1889) he
expresses his strong dissatisfaction with the obscenity and frivolous nature of recent fiction such as Saganoya Omuros Rotten
Eggs (Kusare tamago, 1889), which depicts the slovenly sexual relationships between a female teacher at a Christian school and two
young men. The woman represents both sexual allure and fear of
the female teacher as a new literary figure and femme fatale. Iwamoto urges women to reject and protest against such immoral writings and urges them to make an effort to produce compassionate,
upright texts. Iwamoto states that the true Beauty is a reflection of
moral ideals and emphasizes the moral power and influence of
women.23 Iwamoto further develops this point in the next issue of
Jogaku zasshi in an essay called The True Nature of Women Novelists (Jory shsetsuka no honshoku, March 1889). Noting that the popularity of the novel after such remarkable works as Yano Rykeis
Commendable Anecdotes on Creating a Nation (Keikoku bidan, 1883-84) and
Tsubouchi Shys Manner and Lives of Contemporary Students, has
recently produced many second-rate, frivolous novelists, Iwamoto
sees a similar tendency in the womens novels that followed Nakajima
Shen (1863-1901)s Crossroads of Good and Evil (Zenaku no chimata,
21

Jogaku zasshi, Issue 84 (November 12, 1887): 61-62.

Jogaku zasshi, Issues 2 (August 10, 1885), 3 (August 25, 1885), 5 (September 25,
1885).
23
Jogaku zasshi, Issue 152 (March 9, 1889): 4-5.
22

gender and formation of the modern literary field 155

1887) and Miyake Kaho (1868-1944)s Warbler in the Grove (Yabu no
uguisu, 1888)the earliest new fiction written by Meiji women. Here
Iwamoto relativizes the position and value of the novel and suggests
that those who excel in bungaku or writing and literature do not necessarily have to become novelists but should rather apply their education and talent to translating or writing educational books for
women in such fields as history, economics, physiology, and sciences.
Those women who still want to write novels should utilize the perspective of women and deal with issues that tend to be overlooked
by male writers.
Pay attention to the difference between Mme. de Stael and Victor
Hugo, both of whom aspired to the same ideal [of popular rights], or
that between George Eliot and Shakespeare, both of whom penetrated
the depth of human feelingsMme. de Stael expressed emotions and
passions more keenly and George Eliot represented women with much
more subtlety.
There are countless issues in contemporary Japanese society that are
being overlooked by the current male novelist. Who will be capable of
lamenting and protesting the sufferings of contemporary women, the
plight of prostitutes, the inhumane conditions of prisons, undereducated
children, untreated sick people? Who will be capable of most sincerely
detesting injustice, aspiring to goodness, singing the beauties of Mt. Fuji
and Lake Biwa, and most fully achieving the Art (bijutsu) of this serene
country of the rising sun? Certainly it will not be male literary writers
but will be female literary writers . . . It would be utterly regrettable if
elegant women novelists imitate the vulgar and dirty manners of male
novelists.24

While Iwamotos views on femininity and womens social roles

heavily reflect a combination of Victorian and Puritan gender
conceptions,25 his statement here is actually revealing more of Iwamotos increasing dissatisfaction with contemporary fictiona point
further developed in two essays written in the same year, The Perspective and Attitude of a Novelist (Shsetsuka no chakugan, March

24

Jogaku zasshi, Issue 153 (March 16, 1889): 4-5.

Rebecca Copelands Lost Leaves points to Iwamotos gendered, double standards with regard to the novel and women, emphasizing the patriarchal regulation
and confinement of womens writing. This confining of the woman writer as an
author of gentle emotions, coupled with the injunction not to lose sight of the ideal,
meant that women could safely write only about a bland, unsatisfied kind of love, a
vaguethought certainly not sexualkind of yearning (Lost Leaves, pp. 42-43).
25

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tomi suzuki

1889) and General Theory on the Novel (Shsetsuron ryaku, August

1889).26
While Iwamoto did not deny the value of a realistic novel, he
directed his criticism at the limited subject matter of contemporary
fiction, which, in his view, lacked ideals and had poor critical standards. He valued novels that presented clean, just, and lofty ideals,
and praised Yano Rykeis Commendable Anecdotes on Creating a Nation
and Tkai Sanshis (1852-1922) Chance Meeting with Beautiful Women
(Kajin no kig, 1885-1897) for their concerns with moral and political
justice for the new nation. This critical view was in fact shared by
many contemporary intellectuals, and Iwamotos essay triggered a
series of heated debates in 1889-1891 over the nature and value of
the novel, a debate referred to as the Debate over the Rise or
Decline of Literature (bungaku kyokusui rons). These debates over
whether literature was declining or prospering involved many intellectuals and social critics, including Ozaki Yukio (1858-1954), Tokutomi Soh (1863-1957), Kitamura Tkoku (1868-1894), and Uchida
Roan (1868-1929). The debate was carried out in such journals and
newspapers as Jogaku zasshi, Iratsume, Kokumin shinbun, Chya shinbun,
and Kokumin no tomo. Many of those who saw the decline of literature
(including Tokutomi Soh and Kitamura Tkoku) complained that
contemporary fiction only depicted the silly passions of male and
female students and consequently narrowed the range of the novel,
the true form of which should depict the great ideals of the universe and the true feelings of great individuals for the purpose of
enlightening peoples spirits. The opponents of this view and supporters of recent fiction (such as Uchida Roan) argued that the mission of the novel was to reveal the truth of life aesthetically and
realistically by depicting contemporary human feelings (ninj).27

26

Jogaku zasshi, Issues 154 (March 23, 1889) and 177 (August 31, 1889).
For Bungaku kyokusui rons, see Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of
Japanese Modernity (Standford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 25-26, 195. Jogaku zasshi actually published multiple, different and sometimes dissonant, views on
the contemporary novels. In the fall of 1889, when the Saikaku revival had become
noticeable with the publication of Kda Rohans novel Buddha of Art (Frybutsu), a
short essay favorably introduced recent works by Saganoya Omuro, Yamada Bimy,
Ozaki Ky, and Rohan, and recommended women writers and those aspiring future writers to study both Western literature and the Genroku literature (Issue 184,
October 26, 1889). In early 1890, another essay satirically commented on the current literary fashion and pejoratively mentioned such trends as Genbun-itchi sickness
27

gender and formation of the modern literary field 157

In 1890, Jogaku zasshi published a series of short responses by five
recognized women writers to a questionnaire on their views of the
novel: Responses by Talented Women Novelists (Keish shsetsuka
no t, March-April 1890). Their responses clearly reveal that these
writers, who had started to publish their fiction and translations in
influential journals and newspapers such as Jogaku zasshi, Miyako no
hana, Kokumin no tomo, and Yomiuri shinbun, were engaged in the contemporary debate over the nature and value of the novel.
Many of these women writers firmly believed in the social and
moral mission of the novelist. Koganei Kimiko (1871-1956), a talented translator of Western literature who published an anthology
of translations of Western poetry, Omokage (Vestiges, 1889), with her
elder brother Mori gai (1862-1922), notes that she has been translating Chinese and Western novels in hopes of writing a novel herself.
Although she is advised that what is called realism (kyokujitsuha) is
not suited for women, she hopes to preserve high-mindedness even
when depicting vulgar matters.28 Kimura Akebono (Eiko) (18721890), who published her novel and short stories in the newspaper
Yomiuri shinbun from 1889 to 1890A Mirror of Womanhood (Fujo no
kagami, February 1889), Competing Chastity (Misao kurabe, October
1889), and The Young Pine (Wakamatsu, January 1890)and who
died in October 1890 at age nineteen, states that she wants to write
fiction with a certain central message that can instruct and inspire
contemporary women.29 Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864-1896)a writer,
educator, and noted translator, who married Iwamoto in 1889 and
whose translation of Frances Burnetts Little Lord Fauntleroy (serialized
in Jozaku zasshi from August 1890 to January 1892) had a strong
impact on the subsequent development of genbun-itchi styleasserts
that the mission of women is to contribute to education and improve
social customs and morals. Shizuko expresses her aspiration to utilize
her learning and experience for the benefit of younger women and
to clean up society. In the novel, which represents all aspects of
human life like a painting or photograph of society, the novelist
should present a proper moral vision so that the readers can distin-

and Genroku sickness as well as Translation-style sickness (Issue 204, March 15,
1890).
28
Jogaku zasshi, Issue 205 (March 22, 1890): 13-14.
29
Jogaku zasshi, Issue 206 (March 29, 1890): 14.

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guish between good people/deeds and evil people/deeds.30 The

novel that Shizuko had in mind was a realistic novel that could
reflect and change the readers perspective on contemporary social
reality.
In the fall of 1890, Shimizu Toyoko (Shikin) (1868-1933)who
joined the editorial staff of Jogaku zasshi that year and would publish
a number of editorials and interviews with contemporary men and
women who were promoting womens education and womens
rightspublished a powerful protest called Addressing My Beloved
Sisters with Tears (Naite aisuru shimai ni tsugu, October 1890), which
criticized the newly established regulation that prevented women
from even visiting the newly opened Diet while in session. She
subsequently published an essay, urging potential women writers to
come forward: Why Are the Women of Letters So Slow to Come
Forward? (Onna-bungakusha nan zo izuru koto no osoki ya, November
1890). Being aware of the presence of an increasingly large number
of educated and talented women, Shimizu calls for the more active
presence of women writers. Women should not be satisfied just with
cultivating literary ideals; they should develop their minds so as to
read and judge the living matters of the real world. Shimizu urged
women to come forward and write in the dry and insipid literary
world of Meiji Japan, which currently lacks pure and elegant tastes
because of the inactivity of women writers.31
These emergent women writers associated with Jogaku zasshi shared
the views of the novel held by Iwamoto, valuing moral ideals and
the social and moral efficacy of the novel as well as womens social
role in writing. Many of their novels and essays address womens
education, friendship, aspirations for independence, love, marriage
and the family system, and it is clear that they valued, more than
Iwamoto and perhaps more than Shy himself, the potential of the
realistic novel and its ability to explore current and new gender and
social relations. The social position of women had become strictly
regulated by the new constitution and election law of 1889 (which
gave suffrage only to high tax-paying male citizens above age 25),
by the regulations on meetings and political parties (Shkai oyobi seisha
h) of 1890 (which prevented women from attending any political
30
31

Jogaku zasshi, Issue 207 (April 5, 1890): 14-15.

Jogaku zasshi, Issue 241 (November 29, 1890): 8.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 159

associations or gatherings), and by the establishment of the Imperial
Rescript on Education that reintroduced Confucian gender hierarchies within a family. In these circumstances the emergent women
writers felt that writing by women had a critical social role.32
Gender, Literary Language, and the New Literary Field
In the response to the 1890 Jogaku zasshi questionnaire, Koganei
Kimiko noted that the recent so-called genbun-itchi colloquial style
had some vulgar and lowly aspects, but casting aside genbun-itchi and
simply reproducing the classical style was not desirable for her.
Instead she would attempt to write in an appropriately up-to-date
style by adopting aspects of contemporary living speech and adjusting the syntax and grammar (te-ni-o-ha) that spoken language tends
to lack. Kimura Akebono noted in a newspaper article (Yomiuri shinbun, March 20, 1889) that the so-called genbun-itchi principle is unrealistic, considering the wide gap between the written language and
spoken language in Japan. For Kimura, blindly adopting the fashionable colloquial style in the novel is like wearing a fashionable Western-style dress without considering its unhealthy effects and in the
process abandoning the elegant kimono. Koganei Kimiko, who
responded to Akebono in a newspaper article (Yomiuri shinbun, March
24, 1889), points to the historical development of spoken and written
languages, and argues that those who promote the genbun-itchi principle attempt to avoid adhering to a dead grammar but do not intend
to abandon the elegant gabun style.33
Celebrating the inaugural issue of Female Students (Jogakusei, 1890),
a journal created by Iwamoto and Hoshino Tenchi (1862-1950) for
promoting womens writing, Nakajima Toshiko (Shen)a noted
popular rights activist and pioneering feminist who became a regular
contributor to Jogaku zasshi from 1886stresses that while some
argue that there should be gender distinctions between mens writings and womens writings, she believes that there is no need to
32
For English translations of selected works by Kishida (Nakajima) Toshiko, Shimizu Shikin, Miyake Kaho, and other Meiji women writers, see The Modern Murasaki:
Writing by Women of Meiji Japan, eds. Rebecca Copeland and Melek Ortabasi (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
33
The exchanges between Kimura and Koganei are reprinted in Yamamoto
Masahide, Kindai buntai keisei shiry shsei: hassei-hen (fsha, 1978), pp. 518-524.

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create such distinctions since men and women are naturally different.
Toshiko, who published the first novel by a Meiji woman writer,
Crossroads of Good and Evil (1887),34 skillfully attempts, with a sense of
wit and irony, to refute and sooth those who are threatened by the
idea of the equality of the sexes and the visible rise of womens
education. Toshiko argues that writing in deliberately difficult
Chinese characters will not make the writing manly and using gentle
diction will not make the writing feminine. Instead, writers need to
learn how to express and communicate their ideas freely in
writing.35
In fact, with the spread of education during the 1880s, kanbun and
kangaku (the study of Chinese writings) had become an important
pillar of primary and secondary education and also part of an educated womans curriculum. Kanbun was the basis of literacy and a
central part of language education (for both reading and writing)
until the mid-1890s, when the 1894 revised curriculum for the secondary school eliminated mandatory composition in kanbun for the
first time and emphasized the harmony of kokugo (defined in the
1886 curriculum as writing mixed with Chinese characters or SinoJapanese mixed style) and kanbun, with kokugo as primary and kanbun
as subsidiary.36 The impact of kanbun education is apparent not only
in Nakajima Toshikos (Shen) powerful kanbun-esque essays (Toshiko
in her teens tutored the Meiji empress on Mencius) but also in the
critical writings of a younger generation of women such as Shimizu
Toyoko (Shikin) and Kimura Akebono. Koganei Kimiko, noted for
her elegant mixed-style translations, translated fiction and poetry not
only from English but from classical and Ming-Qing Chinese literature; and many women writers, including Koganei Kimiko, Wakamatsu Shizuko, and Higuchi Ichiy, favored Bakins heroic fiction,
which was written in high-toned Sino-Japanese mixed style, when
they were young.

34
Crossroads of Good and Evil was her adaptation of Bulwer-Lyttons Eugene Aram.
She also wrote an autobiographical novel in the form of political fiction called Splendid Flowers in the Valley (Sankan no meika, 1889).
35
Nakajima Toshiko, Jogakusei ni daisu, Jogaku zasshi, Issue 216 (June 7, 1890).
Reprinted in Kishida [Nakajima] Toshiko hyronsh (Fuji shuppan, 1985), pp. 146-147.
36
See Tasaka Fumio, Meiji jidai no kokugoka kyiku (Tykan shuppansha, 1969)
and Inoue Toshio, Kokugo kyikushi shiry 2: Kykasho-shi (Tky hrei shuppan,
1981).

gender and formation of the modern literary field 161

From the late 1880s, however, there was also renewed interest in
wabun as part of the movement to reform writing in order to create
updated mixed styles, particularly for new poetry and prose. As we
have seen, Shy promoted an updated, more colloquial mixed style
for the realistic and artistic novel, and the first modern histories of
Japanese national literature, Nihon bungakushi and Kokubungakushi,
published in 1890, designated phonetic wabun as the basis of the
national language, and emphasized, following the evolutionist literary
history of Hyppolyte Taine, the historical development and evolution
of the national language, which they saw as incorporating both kanbun and newly encountered Western-derived linguistic elements.37
Following Taines History of English Literature (1864, English translation, 1872), these histories of Japanese national literature also
described Japanese national literature and national character as
elegant and graceful (ybi) (in contradistinction to grand and
heroic Chinese literature and precise, detailed, and exhaustive
Western literature), apparently due to their view of phonetic wabun
as the basis of the Japanese national language as well as to their
characterization of pure literature (junbungaku).38 This position was
shared by the influential shinkokubun (new national writing) movement
to promote the creation of an updated wabun-based mixed style as a
new literary language, a movement initiated by the kokubungaku
scholar and poet Ochiai Naobumi (1861-1903) in 1890 and soon
supported by Mori gai (1862-1922) and others. After his return
37
In 1890, the first modern literary histories as well as the earliest modern anthologies of classical Japanese literature were published by the first university graduates in kokubungaku (studies of national literature): Ueda Kazutoshis (1867-1937)
Kokubungaku [National literature, 1890, an anthology of late Edo and early-Meiji
works with a short preface; Haga Yaichi (1867-1927) and Tachibana Senzaburs
(1867-1901) Kokubungaku tokuhon [Japanese literature reader, 1890], a short anthology
of Japanese literature from Kakinomoto no Hitomaro to Takizawa Bakin, with a
concise literary history from ancient times through the Meiji period; Nihon bungaku
zensho [Complete works of Japanese literature, 1890-1892], a twenty-four-volume
collection of classical and medieval literature compiled by Ochiai Naobumi (18611903), Hagino Yoshiyuki (1860-1924), and Konakamura (Ikebe) Yoshikata (18641923); and Mikami Sanji (1865-1939) and Takatsu Kuwasaburs (1864-1921)
two-volume Nihon bungakushi [History of Japanese literature, 1890], the first fulllength literary history of Japan, with abundant excerpts from ancient to late-Edo
texts.
38
On the gender implications in the construction of Japanese national literature,
see Tomi Suzuki, Gender and Genre: Modern Literary Histories and Womens
Diary Literature, in Inventing the Classics, pp. 75-80.

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from a five-year stay in Germany, gai developed a unique experimental Japanese-Chinese-Western mixed style (wa-kan-y konkbun)
in his translation of European poetry in the anthology Omokage (Vestiges, 1889) and in the novellas of his German trilogyMaihime
(Dancing girl, 1890), Utakata no ki (Foam on the waves, 1890),
and Fumi-zukai (The Courier, 1891).
Although the notion of genbun-itchi was advocated in the mid-1880s
in such works as Mozume Takamis book Genbun-itchi (1886) and
although experimental colloquial styles were explored in such works
as Futabatei Shimeis Ukigumo and his translations from Russian novels, the phonocentric notion of genbun-itchi did not become established
until much later, in the late 1900s, if not later.39 Until the late 1900s,
there had been no binary contrast between the modern genbun-itchi
style and the traditional styles. Instead, there were multiple styles:
kanbun, wabun, Sino-Japanese styles (hentai-kanbun or wakan konkbun),
new translation styleswhich incorporated idioms and syntactical
features of Western languages into the Sino-Japanese styles (bunchokuyakutai)and various experimental colloquial styles. The new
written styles were a variegated amalgam experimented with from
the mid-1880s, and the dominant conception of the written style was
best represented by such notions as gazoku setch-tai (high-low fused
style) and wa-kan-y konkbun (Japanese-Chinese-Western mixed
style), which actually allowed for various different mixtures. Although
the need to create a standard modern national spoken language
(hyjungo) was proclaimed after the Sino-Japanese War by Ueda
Kazutoshi (1867-1937) and the government began promoting the
establishment of a standardized plain colloquial style (kgobun) in the
state-compiled primary school textbooks (first published in 1903/
1904),40 the mixed styles of gazoku setchtai and wa-kan-y konkbun
39
Mozume argued in 1900 that genbun-itchi in the strict sense is possible only in
conversational writing (kaiwabun) and that it is actually unsuited to expository writing
(kirokubun), the essence of which should be conciseness and precision. Yamamoto
Masahide, Kindai buntai hassei no shiteki kenky (Iwanami shoten, 1965), pp. 290-96.
40
The linguist Ueda Kazutoshi, chief architect of the national language policy,
returned from a four-year research stay (18901894) in Germany (where he had
witnessed the promotion of a standardized national language by the Deutscher
Sprachverein) and gave a lecture, Kokugo to kokka to [National language and our
nation, 1894], in which he referred to the national language (kokugo) as the spiritual blood binding the nations people together. In Hyjungo ni tsukite [On a
Standard language, 1895], Ueda argued that the establishment of a standard spoken language (hyjungo)in contradistinction to regional dialectswas the foremost

gender and formation of the modern literary field 163

continued to dominate writing both as discourse and in practice.
What was called futsbun (standard written style), an updated wa-kany (Sino-Japanese-Western) mixed style that had come into general
use in newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and government business
from the late 1890s, continued to be the standard expository style
until the early 1920s.41
Later scholars have sometimes thought that Meiji women wrote
in or were confined to a traditional, neo-classical feminine style
having been made the custodians of the native traditionand that
the new male writers developed the modern westernized genbun-itchi
written style and that as a consequence women writers were excluded
from modern literary history. The shift from the lively colloquial
genbun-itchi style in Miyake Kahos first work Warbler in the Grove (1888)
to the gabun-esque style in The Eightfold Cherry Blossom (Yaezakura) two
years later (1890) is often mentioned as an evidence of the confinement of women writers to the elegant, traditional style. However,
Kahos Yaezakura, like many other novels written by women in the
1890s, including those of Shimizu Shikin and Higuchi Ichiy, actually includes heavy use of dialogue in various colloquial styles and
experiments with new sentence constructions. In short, Meiji women
writers from the mid-1880s were far more part of the contemporary
linguistic and literary practices than is generally thought. For them,
as for contemporary male writers, until the mid-1900s the distinction

priority for Japans development as a modern nation-state, stressing the interdependence of colloquialization and standardization. Ueda persuaded the government to
set up the National Language Research Council (established in 1902) to begin a serious, coordinated examination of language policy at the national level, which resulted
in the publication of state-compiled school textbooks (announced in 1903 and put
into operation from 1904 and continued until 1948). See Yamamoto Masahide,
Genbun-itchi no rekishi ronk: Zoku-hen (fsha, 1981), Chaps. 10-14; Nanette Twine,
Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese (London: Routledge, 1991),
Chap. 6; and Lee Yeounsuk, Kokugo to iu shis (Iwanami shoten, 1996), Chaps.
1-2.
41
The primary-school textbooks edited and published by the government in
1903-1904 adopted, to a significant degree, the colloquial genbun-itchi style for the
lower grades. However, the genbun-itchi style became the dominant style in the secondary school textbooks only toward the end of the Taish period, from the mid1920s. Newspaper articles written in the colloquial style started to appear after the
mid-1900s, and in 1922 the editorial columns of the major newspapers, which had
long preserved the traditional expository style, shifted to the genbun-itchi style. Legal
documents and government papers continued to be written in the traditional expository style until after World War II.

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was not between the genbun-itchi style and the traditional, classical or
kanbun styles. Instead, they worked in new amalgamated styles that
were highly variegated, and which included kango, new translation
styles, and various colloquial styles.
While Iwamoto became disillusioned by the new realistic novels,
his belief in women as having the potential to be more genuine artists
increased after 1890. In an essay entitled Great Women Poets
(Keish daishijin, March 1890), Iwamoto stated that at the time of
literatures greatest decline, the only hope is the appearance of great
women poets. In his view women, who know by intuition rather than
by cognition, and who synthesize rather than analyze, are born
poets.42 In an essay entitled Talented Women in the Literary World
(Bunkai no keish, September 1896), published a year after the end of
the Sino-Japanese War, Iwamoto expressed his concerns for people
marginalized by rapid industrialization. As demonstrated by Mrs.
Stowe, the author of Uncle Toms Cabin, it is women who can reveal
and address social injustice, particularly with regard to the suffering
of women.43 In 1899, Iwamoto praised the late Higuchi Ichiy (who
died in 1896) as the woman writer who had reached the highest level
of literature, stating that she was even greater than Kda Rohan
(1867-1947) and Ozaki Ky (1868-1903), whom he considered the
two most prominent contemporary male novelists, a widely held view
at the time. Iwamoto celebrates the truthfulness and sincerity of
Ichiys writings and in particular her depiction of the real emotions
of various types of women, all of which he attributes to Ichiys
unique talent as well as to her being a woman writer.44
In 1895, following the Sino-Japanese War, new influential journals
emerged, such as Teikoku bungaku (Imperial Literature, 1895-1920) and
Taiy (The Sun, 1895-1928). In December 1895 a new literary journal,
Bungei kurabu (Literary Club, established by the large and influential
publishing company Hakubunkan, which also started the influential
general-interest journal Taiy in the same year), published a special
issue called Novels by Talented Women Writers (Keish shsetsu),
with works by eleven contemporary women novelists and several
waka poems in the new style waka (shintai-ka). The issue was a great

42
43
44

Jogaku zasshi, Issue 203 (March 8, 1890): 3-7.

Jogaku zasshi, Issue 426 (September 25, 1896):1-2.
Ichiy joshi o tsuikaisu, Jogaku zasshi, Issue 496 (September 25, 1899): 1-4,

gender and formation of the modern literary field 165

commercial hit and reviews of it appeared in a number of prominent
journals, such as Jogaku zasshi, Kokumin no tomo, Teikoku bungaku, and
Waseda bungaku. Generally, the reviews favorably recognized the quality of the works included in the issue, while revealing the male critics
sense of curiosity and superiority. For example, a critic in Teikoku
bungaku notes:
Recently, I have written that women are never suited to be poets in
the strict sense of the term, but I have to add a few words regarding
the fact that there have been examples of successful women as novelists in the past and present, in countries east and west. History has
rarely witnessed women who have had great achievements in either
the natural science or the humanities. Women philosophers or women
logicians are a contradiction in terms . . . In music, there is no female
Beethoven, Handel, or Mendelssohn; and in the long history of poetry
there is only the ancient Sappho and more recently Mrs. Browning.
However, there have been many examples of women who have succeeded as novelists. Why? There is only one reason. It is because of
the heart. The novel is a field appropriate for women to manage.

In a condescending tone perhaps mixed with a sense of anxiety, this

critic regards the novel as not that important a genre and therefore
considers it an appropriate field for women.45
In fact, until the mid-1900s, the notion of bungaku largely meant
the humanities in general (including history, philosophy, and poetry)
and the position of the novel remained quite ambivalent, as is evident
in the pages of Teikoku bungaku (1895-1920), Waseda bungaku (First
Series: 1891-1898), and Bungakukai (1893-1898). Bungakukai, which
introduced Romanticism to Japan, branched out from Jogaku zasshi,
led by its younger, more literary-oriented male members such as
Hoshino Tenchi, Kitamura Tkoku, and Shimazaki Tson (18721943).46 While Bungakukai was sympathetic toward women writers
and prized Higuchi Ichiys narrative fiction from 1893 through the
time of her death in 1896, the primary genres for these male Bungakukai members were new-style poetry, critical treatises, and translations of Western poetic and philosophical writings (it was not until

45

Shsetsuka to shite no josei, Teikoku bungaku, vol. 2, no. 2 (1896): 213-214.

Bungakukai started initially as a literary division of Jogaku zasshi and also incorporated Jogakusei (the chief editor of which was Hoshino Tenchi). For the relationship
among the three magazines, see Michael Brownstein, Jogaku Zasshi and the Founding of Bungakukai, Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 35, no. 3 (1980): 319-336.
46

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the early 1900s that Tson and others shifted their primary genre
to the novel as the best and ultimate literary form).
Following the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, however,
the novel rapidly acquired a more respectable cultural position. It
was at this time that the so-called Japanese Naturalist writers and
critics assumed a hegemonic position through newly established
literary journals such as Shinch (established in 1904), Waseda Bungaku
(Second Series started in 1906 with Shimamura Hgetsu as its central figure),47 and Bunsh sekai (established in 1906 with Tayama Katai
as its chief editor). These journals widely enforced the value and
authority of the newly institutionalized genbun-itchi language. Following the death of Ozaki Ky (1868-1903), the leader of the Kenysha
(The Society of Friends of the Inkstone) and the most popular and
influential fiction writer in the 1890s and early 1900s, Tayama Katai
(1871-1930) published Rokotsunaru bysha (Unadorned description) in the influential general-interest magazine Taiy, in which he
named Ky, Rohan, Shy, and gai as past great giants and
attacked the contemporary advocates of artificial literary technique
(ima no gikronsha) as slaves of literary style. Katai criticized earlier
Meiji literature as powdered, ornate writings or gilt-plated literature (mekki bungaku) and proudly placed the new inclination toward
unadorned, bold description in contemporary Japanese writing
alongside the new trend in Western literature (as exemplified by
fin-de-sicle revolutionaries such as Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy,
Emile Zola, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriele DAnnunzio, Gerhart
Hauptmann, and Hermann Sudermann). According to Katai, these
Western writers destroyed the gilded literature of not only classicism but also of Romanticism by being outspoken, truthful, and
natural.48
From 1906 to 1907, critics and novelists such as Shimamura
Hgetsu (1871-1918), Tayama Katai, Shimazaki Tson, Iwano
Hmei (1873-1920), Sma Gyof (1883-1950), Hasegawa Tenkei
(1876-1940), Katagami Tengen (1884-1928), and Masamune
Hakuch (1879-1962) emphasized their sincerity as well as their
47

The first Waseda Bungaku, which was established by Tsubouchi Shy in 1891,
ended in 1898, and the Second Series Waseda Bungaku began in 1906 (continued
until 1927) with Shimamura Hgetsu as its central figure.
48
Tayama Katai, Rokotsunaru bysha, in Kindai hyron sh I, Nihon kindai
bungaku taikei, vol. 57 (Kadokawa shoten, 1972), pp. 198-203.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 167

subjective and emotional involvement in their relentless exploration of (hidden, internal) truth, which dealt with ordinary, everyday life, often focusing on the dark side of private experiences and
sexual encounters. They contrasted their Neo-Naturalism (shinshizenshugi)characterized by the fusion of subject/object and the
fusion of intellect/emotionwith the objective realism (shajitsushugi) of their immediate predecessors and rivals such as Kosugi
Tengai (1865-1952) and Oguri Fy (1875-1926), who, the Japanese
Naturalists claimed, depicted only the external facts and could not
truly touch life.49
In an influential article titled Naturalism in Literary Arts (Bungeij
no shizenshugi, Waseda bungaku, 1908), Shimamura Hgetsu, a leading
critic, presented a literary history of Japanese Naturalism in which
he made a clear distinction between the Early Naturalism (zenki
shizenshugi) of such writers as Kosugi Tengai, who sought objective
description under the influence of Zola, and the recently emerged
Late Naturalism (kki shizenshugi) of such works as Shimazaki
Tsons Hakai (The broken commandment, 1906), Kunikida Doppo
(1871-1908)s Dopposh (Doppo collection, 1905), Tayama Katais Futon
(Quilt, 1907), Futabateis Sono omokage (In his image, 1906), and Masamune Hakuchs Kjin (Vermilion dust, 1907). Pointing out that Late
Naturalism was a special current in Japan that appeared after Japanese intellectuals experienced Sturm und Drang or Romanticism
from around 1901-1902 (when enthusiastic zeal for Nietzsche and
Aesthetic Life emerged) until 1904-1905, Hgetsu aligned recent
Japanese Naturalism with European Impressionism, Symbolism, and
fin-de-sicle Decadence. All of these movements were understood as
a further development of European Naturalism, which attempted to

49
Hasegawa Tenkei, Genmetsu jidai no geijutsu [Art in the age of disillusionment], Taiy (October 1906), Katagami Tengen, Heibon shakunaru jujitsu no
kachi [The value of ordinary and ugly facts], Shinsei (April 1907), Shimamura
Hgetsu, Ima no bundan to shin-shizenshugi [Todays literary world and NeoNaturalism], Waseda bungaku (June 1907), Futon gappy [Joint review of Katais
Futon], Waseda bungaku (October 1907), Sma Gyof, Bungeij shukaku rytai no
ykai [The fusion of subject and object in literature], Waseda bungaku (October
1907), Shimamura Hgetsu, Bungeij no shizenshugi [Naturalism in literature],
Waseda bungaku (January 1908), Shimamura Hgetsu, Shizenshugi no kachi [The
value of naturalism], Waseda bungaku (May 1908). All in Kindai bungaku hyron taikei,
vol. 3 (Kadokawa shoten, 1972).

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liberate individuals by addressing social and moral problems and to

destroy traditional social norms and literary forms.50
In establishing a new literary position, the Japanese Naturalist
writers and critics aggressively promoted the newly institutionalized
genbun-itchi colloquial written language as a normative literary style
for the novel of a new age. They emphasized the clarity, directness,
and immediacy of genbun-itchi as being suited to unaffected and
sincere expression, and forcibly classified the various mixed styles
into the neo-classical gabun style, the classical Chinese-based kanbun
style, or the modern colloquial genbun-itchi style.51 Until the late 1900s,
there was no binary contrast between the modern genbun-itchi style
and the traditional style, but in designating themselves as the
standard bearers of the advanced modern colloquial genbun-itchi
literary style, the Naturalist writers and critics aggressively linked
many of the earlier literary writers of the 1890s-1900s, such as Ozaki
Ky, Izumi Kyka (1873-1939), and Higuchi Ichiy, with what they
called the elegant and outdated gabun or pseudo-classical gikobun
style, emphasizing its traditional, ornamental, and feminine
character. A clear line had been established between classical language, which had been feminized, and modern language, dominated by the Naturalist writers.
It so happened that a number of talented women writers had died
by 1900 at a young age: Kimura Akebono died in 1890 at the age
of 19, Wakamatsu Shizuko died in 1896 at the age of 33, Tazawa
Inafune died in 1896 at the age of 23, Higuchi Ichiy died in 1896
at the age of 25, Kitada Usurai died in 1900 at the age of 25. In the
politics of literary history (first laid out by Naturalist writers and
critics in the late 1900s) these deaths were regarded symbolically, as
the end of the epoch of women writers. By contrast, those leading
male authors who died shortly before the Russo-Japanese Warsuch
as Ozaki Ky (died in 1903 at the age of 35), Masaoka Shiki (died
1902 at the age of 35), Takayama Chogy (died 1902 at the age of

50
Shimamura Hgetsu, Bungeij no shizenshugi, in Kindai bungaku hyron taikei,
vol. 3, pp. 101-102, 111-117.
51
See Tayama Katais series of questionnaires and reports regarding the written
styles in Bunsh sekai, such as Shrai no joshi no bunsh ni tsukite, Bunsh sekai,
vol. 1, no. 2 (April 1906); Genbun-itchi ni tsukite, Bunsh sekai, vol. 1, no. 3 (May
1906); Genbun-itchi igai no bunsh o manabu y ari ya, Bunsh sekai, vol. 3, no. 15
(November 1908).

gender and formation of the modern literary field 169

31), and Kitamura Tkoku (died in 1894 at the age of 26), were
lionized and made into past giants, who paved the way to the
autonomous field of modern literature, and whose mantle was now
transferred to the Japanese Naturalists. The only woman writer
included among the past giants of modern Japanese literature was
Higuchi Ichiy, who was transfigured into the token embodiment of
an old (furui) Japanese womens literary tradition dating from the
time of Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shnagon.52
It is noteworthy that Yosano Akikos (1878-1941) Shinyaku Genji
monogatari (New Translation of The Tale of Genji, 1912-1913), the first
complete modern colloquial translation of The Tale of Genji, appeared
in this literary and cultural context.53 Akiko had established herself
as a celebrated tanka poet and the queen of the Myj group, and
her tanka collection Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901) had had a decisive
impact on the aesthetic direction and popularity of the literary magazine Myj (19001908). But in the late 1900s, both the tanka genre
and the gabun-based mixed style were placed in a secondary position
by the rise of the colloquial-style novel, which had become the central literary genre of the new age. Beginning in 1906, Akiko, like
many of her Myj male colleagues, started to write essays and short
stories in the new colloquial style, but it was her modern translation
of The Tale of Genji that allowed her to fully explore the new fictional
form and language with confidence and authority. In the postface
to her translation, she notes that she attempted to best transpose
the spirit of the original into the contemporary language through a
free translation. With the newly constructed division between the
modern and classical languages, Akiko took on a privileged liter52

For the changing receptions of Higuchi Ichiy, see Seki Reiko, Ane no chikara:
Higuchi Ichiy (Chikuma shob, 1993), pp. 209-10, 245-248; Ichiy igo no josei hygen
(Kanrin shob, 2003), pp. 8-12, 48. For the media construction of the images of literary authors, see Nakayama Akihiko, Shi no rekishi-monogatari, Bungaku, vol. 5,
no. 3 (Summer 1994): 16-29.
53
Murasaki Shikibu, Shinyaku Genji monogatari, trans. Yosano Akiko (Kanao
Bunend, 1912-1913). For Akiko and the Genji in the larger Meiji literary context,
see G.G. Rowley, Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese
Studies, University of Michigan, 2000), and Seki, Ichiy igo no josei hygen. See also
Shinma Shinichi, Yosano Akiko to Genji monogatari, in Kodai bungaku rons, vol. 6,
Genji monogatari to sono eiky (Musashino shoin, 1978). After completing the colloquial
translation and rewriting of the Genji, Akiko serialized her only long, autobiographical novel, entitled Akarumi e [To light], in The Tokyo Asahi Newspaper from June to
September of 1913.

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ary position in the recently established field of literature as a bilingual translator and mediator between the feminized classical
language and the new modern colloquial language, paradoxically
naturalizing and reinforcing the newly gendered linguistic divide.
It has often been claimed by later modern scholars that women
novelists disappeared from the central literary stage with the emergence in the 1900s of Naturalism, which focused on the exploration
of truth and scientific objectivity, domains and qualities associated
with masculinity and said to be suited more to men.54 What is
noteworthy, however, is that the so-called Japanese Naturalists
assumed a hegemonic literary position, differentiating themselves
from their immediate predecessors and rivals by emphasizing their
sincerity as well as their subjective and emotional involvement
in their subject matter. Significantly, the qualities that the Japanese
Naturalists claimed for the literature of new agesubjective and
emotional involvement, sincerity, and emphasis on personal experience and private interioritywere the very attributes that had
defined women, particularly women writers in the 1890s. At this
point, in the mid-1900s (specifically from 1906-1907) after the end
of the Russo-Japanese War, this notion of sincerity, subjective and
emotional involvement, and the emphasis on private experience
became the defining feature of so-called pure literature (junbungaku),
that is to say, literature as an autonomous cultural field.55 Significantly,
terms such as junbungaku or bibungaku (elegant writing, belles-lettres),
which had been used since the 1890 in contradistinction to the
broader notion of bungaku (learning, studies, humanities, literature), started to disappear after this time, with literary art or aesthetic literature becoming simply bungaku.

54
See, for e.g., Takada Mizuho, Kindai bungaku to jory, in Nihon jory bungakushi, ed. Yoshida Seiichi (Ybun shoin, 1969).
55
This is clearly represented in the revised and expanded edition of Meiji bungakushi (1909) by Iwaki Juntar, who extensively changed his literary historical narrative from the first edition published in 1906. This first book-length full literary
history of Meiji literature was published as part of Meiji rekishi zensh, compiled by the
authoritative professors of Tokyo Imperial University: Inoue Tetsujir, Tsuboi Kumaz, and Haga Yaichi. Iwakis Meiji bungakushi (the revised edition), which was a
long seller (reprinted in 1927 and again in 1948), basically adopts the same literary
historical narrative as that outlined by Naturalist critics such as Shimamura Hgetsu.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 171

Gender and Literary Modernism, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy
As literature, particularly the novel, became a respectable, serious
and profitable modern cultural field,56 and with the formation of a
male-dominated literary guildwhich created gender-based
magazines and literary journalswomen, both as emergent active
readers and writers of literature, were placed on the periphery.57 This
tendency would be further reinforced in the mid-1920swhen
journalism and readership vastly expandedwith the emergence of
what I have called I-novel discourse, a dominant reading and
interpretive paradigm that governed contemporary views of the
Japanese literary and cultural tradition from the mid-1920s until
recently.58 The notion of the I-novel (watakushi shsetsu or shishsetsu)
was contrasted with the Western novel (and the individual self in
Western society), which was thought to form an autonomous fictional
world based on imagination and construction. In contrast to the

56
See, for example, Uchida Roans retrospect The Advancement of the Social
Status of Literary Writers in the Past Twenty-five Years (Nijgonenkan no bunjin no
shakaiteki chii no shinpo), published in the magazine Taiy in June, 1912.
57
For the formation of the modern male homosocial literary field in Japan, see
Iida Yko, Karera no monogatari (Nagoya daigaku shuppan, 1998). In 1898, after a
decade of debate in which a liberal civil code had been rejected because of the
threat it seemed to pose to traditional Japanese concepts of loyalty and filial piety,
a new code was announced, one that strengthened the concept of the ie (house/family) and tied it to a patriarchal emperor-system. Resurrecting the ie, the Meiji civil
code made the authority of the patriarch absolute. The stipulation that all property
would be inherited by the oldest son not only did away with the diversity of custom
practiced since Tokugawa; it made it virtually impossible for women to be thought
of as anything but commodities in a continuing patriarchal, patrilineal market. In
1899, the government issued an Ordinance on the Womens Higher-School (Kt
jogakk rei), which emphasized that the goal of womens education was to create
good wives, wise mothers (Sharon Sievers, Flowers in Salt, pp. 110-113). Women,
integrally linked to the family and then to the nation, comprised a group. In 1898
only 1-2% of girls went beyond elementary school; readers of womens magazines
were mainly upper-class schoolgirls, though later in the 1920s the shift is to the lower- and middle-class, and older women. The foundation for the extraordinary
growth of womens magazines in the early twentieth century was nothing less than
the expanded education given to upper-class women in the Meiji period (Barbara
Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan, Duke
University Press, 2003, pp. 80-81). For translations of some male critics views of
womens writings (from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century), see Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Womens Writing, ed.
Rebecca Copeland (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006).
58
See Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self.

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Western novel, it was claimed that the modern Japanese novel (and
the Japanese self in Japanese society) is best represented by the
I-novel, the quintessential national form rooted in a long indigenous
tradition that presented the authors lived, personal experiences most
directly. The notion of the I-novel was always a value-laden
concept and the binary contrast with the Western novel was used
either to celebrate a unique Japanese tradition (in the mid-1920 and
in the 1960s) or to condemn Japans immature or deformed
modernity (claimed in the postwar period, particularly in the 1950s).
In the former case, the category I-novel usually excluded women
writers. From the 1910s and 1920s, a number of emerging women
writers wrote autobiographical, confessional novels, but their works
were not referred to as I-novels in a positive sense but categorized
as womens literature (jory bungaku), a journalistic category that
was established in the 1920s with the vast expansion of women as
readers and writers. The term womens literature was used to refer,
often disparagingly, to the popular or mass literature written by
women for women readers.59 Takami Jun (1907-1965), considered
to be one of the foremost writers of pure literature, mentioned in
the 1960s that women can never write a true I-novel.60 On the
other hand, when the notion of the I-novel was used negatively,
as an emblem of Japans immature or false modernity, it was
often associated with the feminine Japanese literary tradition that
originated in Heian womens writingsin the Kager Diary in particular.61
The persistent ways by which both the notions of Japanese Naturalism in the late 1900s and the I-novel in the mid-1920s and in the
1960s excluded women writers, however, paradoxically reveal the
undeniable presence of women as readers and writers in these
periods. A number of new literary journals were established from
the late 1900s to the early 1910s: Subaru (January 1909-December
1913), Mita bungaku (May 1910-), and Shirakaba (April 1910-August

59
For the emergence of the concept of womens literature in the 1920s, see
Joan Ericson, The Origins of the Concept of Womens Literature, in The Womans
Hand, eds. Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 74-115.
60
Shishsetsu no honshitsu to mondaiten, Kokubungaku kaishaku to kansh, December 1962.
61
See Tomi Suzuki, Gender and Genre, pp. 87-91.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 173

1923), in addition to the ones mentioned earlier. Alongside such
contemporary (mostly male) literary journals appeared the womens
literary coterie journal Seit (Bluestocking, September 1911-February
1916) led by Hiratsuka Raich (1886-1971). It was the first Japanese
literary journal written and edited by women for women. It is
noteworthy that the Seit members originally sought, like their
contemporary Shirakaba humanists, to fully develop their individual
talent primarily through literature, as declared at the beginning of
the associations general principles (Seitsha gaisoku): Our association
aims to develop womens literature, to have each individual member
realize her own natural talent, and to give birth to women geniuses
at some future date. Significantly, the phrase literature was erased
from the associations general principles after the October 1913 issue:
Our association aims to awaken women, to have each individual
member realize her own natural talent, and to give birth to women
geniuses at some future date. While the Seit members shifted their
primary emphasis from literature to wider feminist social issues,
addressing womens sexuality and gender and social relations, they
continued to employ various literary genres in Seit: the essay (ronbun),
the short story (shsetsu), translation of contemporary Western literary
works and feminist essays (honyaku), waka poetry (tanka), drama
(gikyoku), free-verse poetry (shi), the critical essay (hyron), the personal
essay (kans), the letter (tegami), and the diary (nikki). Except for a
handful of writersHiratsuka Raich and Yamakawa Kikue (18901980), who were recognized as feminist critics and activists, and
Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945) and Hasegawa Shigure (1879-1941),
who were recognized as a woman novelist and a playwright
respectivelymost of the literary writers associated with Seit
remained invisible in the wider literary sphere until the establishment
of the journalistic category womens literature in the 1920s. In
1928 Hasegawa Shigure established the womens literary journal
Nyonin geijutsu (Womens Art, 1928-1932), which involved a number
of active and emergent women writers, many of whomsuch as
Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951), Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-1972), Uno
Chiyo (1897-1996), and Enchi Fumiko (1905-1986)became leading
writers in the postwar period. This formed the background to
Mishimas remark cited at the beginning of this chapter.
Although Japanese Naturalism and the I-novel, with their stress
on private experience and immediacy of expression, are often

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regarded by later critics and scholars as subscribing to nave realism

without a true grasp of Western realism and naturalism, it is
noteworthy that the Japanese Naturalists, as well as many critics and
younger writers, in the late 1900s regarded themselves as the
vanguard of the new literary and artistic current of the new age,
aligning themselves with Symbolism, Impressionism, and fin-de-sicle
European Decadence and early modernism in general, all of which
were understood as a radical attempt to destroy old, established
social norms and literary forms, that is to say, as a radical questioning
of dominant bourgeois cultural norms represented by the principles
of rationalism, positivism, and progress. This new, anti-progressive
counter-discourse was received enthusiastically as the most
advanced new phase of Western literary modernity. Ibsen, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Sudermann, Flaubert, Maupassant, Daudet,
Zola, DAnnunzio, Huysmans, Gogol, Merezhkovsky, Baudelaire,
Mallarm, Wagner, Oscar Wilde, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and
Nietzsche were vigorously introduced at almost the same time. The
fin-de-sicle works of psychopathologyaddressing social degeneracy
and gender ambivalence (the crisis of masculinity) in a vastly
expanding mass industrial societywere also translated successively
from the mid-1900s to the early 1910s (and they were popularized
widely during the 1920s): Cesare Lombrosos Luomo di genio in rapporto
alla psichiatria (1889; English translation Man of Genius in 1891;
translated into Japanese in 1898 and 1914), Max Nordaus Entartung
(1893; English translation Degeneration in 1895; partial Japanese
translation in 1907 and the full translation in 1914), Otto Weiningers
Geschlecht und Charakter (1903; English translation Sex and Character in
1906; translated into Japanese in 1906), and Richard von KrafftEbings Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; English translation 1892, 1900,
1902, 1906; translated into Japanese in 1913). They gave a quasiscientific authority to Japanese literary writers who received this as
part of a larger modernist counter-discourse.
When literature was established as an autonomous cultural field
in the post-Russo-Japanese War period, differentiating itself from
earlier, broader notions of bungaku as well as from other modern
social and cultural fields, orthodox discourse on modern Japanese
literature (as represented by Japanese Naturalism) assimilated the
discourse of European early literary modernism, which was characterized by anti-utilitarian aestheticism and gender ambivalence. In

gender and formation of the modern literary field 175

Japan, as in many other non-Western countries, the discourse of
modernismwhich in Europe emerged as a counter-discourse to
dominant bourgeois industrial modernity in the face of expanding
mass industrial societyin fact actively contributed to the articulation of national cultural identity vis--vis Western modernity. This
was epitomized in the literary sphere by the notion of the I-novel,
which emerged in the 1920s and which governed contemporary
views of the Japanese literary and cultural tradition from the mid1920s until recently. From the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, under
the influence of contemporary European avant-garde experimental
modernism (represented by Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and
Surrealism), a younger generation of modernist writers such as
Yokomitsu Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari started their literary
careers by questioning the prevailing conventions of realist representation as well as the notion of the I-novel. From the mid-1930s,
however, the works of these modernist writers would take a rapid
nationalistic turn. In 1935, a younger generation of literary modernists such as Yasuda Yojr (1910-1981) and Kamei Katsuichir
(1907-1966) established a journal called The Japan Romantic School
(Nihon rmanha, 1935-1938) and espoused an anti-progressive, ironic
aestheticism and a self-consciously constructed nationalistic classicism.
As is revealed in the modernist novelist Hori Tatsuo (1904-1953)s
interest in adapting Heian womens diaries such as Kager Diary and
Sarashina Diary, and Dazai Osamus (1909-1948) series of stories narrated in a womans voice, male modernist writers interest in feminine writing became a noticeable phenomenon from the late 1930s.
This is the current that Tanizakis view of Japanese language prefigured in the early 1930s. In his reflections on the Japanese language, Tanizaki envisioned two types of writing: (1) the hegemonic,
standardized genbun-itchi writing, whose clear, precise, and rational
style was suited to science and philosophy, and (2) the disappearing
original Japanese language, whose overtones and evocative quality
were appropriate for literature and whose main concern was emotion
and beauty. Defining hegemonic writing as masculine and the original Japanese language as feminine, Tanizaki appointed himself the
leader of feminine writing. His self-conscious stylistic gender identification was similar to that of the fin-de-sicle European modernists
of the Decadent and Aesthetic movements, who appropriated textual

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femininity in order to create an identity opposed to the dominant

bourgeois cultural norms, represented by rationalism, positivism, and
the ideology of progress. It has also been observed that these male
writers regarded their artificial femininity as a sophisticated, selfconscious, and ironic performance, as opposed to the behavior of
raw and natural women, thus re-inscribing the hierarchical gender and social distinctions they ostensibly contested. With their freefloating gender mobility and aesthetic sophistication, these modernists
attempted to differentiate themselves from mainstream bourgeois
masculinity as well as from women and the growing masses, the
twin symbols of the democratizing mediocrity of modern life. 62
The distinction that Tanizaki made between standardized genbun-itchi
and the so-called original Japanese language, and his association of
this original language with the feminine wabun style and the past,
was the symbolic means by which he placed himself in a unique
modernist position vis--vis the standardized language, the stateoriented bourgeois industrial society, and male and female writers
of modern Japanese literature. By criticizing genbun-itchi language as
the epitome of the hegemonic ideology of a centralized modern
nation-state and as the foundation of mainstream modern Japanese
literaturewith its emphasis on mimesis and private interiority
Tanizaki, in effect, suggested the complicity of the two.63
Quite ironically and paradoxically, however, Tanizakis oppositional discourse on Japanese language and cultural tradition echoes
the orthodox discourse on Japanese national literature from the late
1880s. As we have seen, the first modern histories of Japanese literature published in 1890 described Japanese literature and mentality
as elegant and graceful (ybi), in contrast to the heroic and grand
(ys gitsu) character of Chinese literature and the precise, detailed,
and exhaustive (seichi) nature of Western literature. Indeed, discourse on Japanese literature from the late 1880s onincluding
Tsubouchi Shys Shsetsu shinzui, the first national literary histories,

62
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995), p. 106. See also Andreas Huyssen, Mass Culture as Woman: Modernisms
Other, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 4562.
63
For related issues on Tanizaki and modernism, see Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the
Self, chapter 7 and Epilogue, and Modernism and Gender: Tanizakis Theories of
Japanese Language, Asiatica Venetiana 5 (2000): 157175.

gender and formation of the modern literary field 177

and the critical discourse developed by many literary writers active
in the years following the Russo-Japanese Warassimilated the discourse of literary modernism, with its emphasis on anti-utilitarian
aestheticism and its ambivalent literary gender association. Modern
Japanese literature, particularly the novel and the critical discourse
surrounding the novel, has actively participated in the construction
of heterosexual and homosocial orthodox modern bourgeois relations
as well as in the construction of a gendered national subject while
often revealing the ambivalence and anxiety involved in such constructions. As we have seen, this originary ambivalence derived from
the position of literature as both an orthodox modern cultural field
and as an important form of counter-discourse.

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failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

179

FAILED MODERN GIRLS IN

EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA*
Tze-lan D. Sang

A 1933 report in The Star Monthly (Mingxing yuekan), a movie fanzine

founded by the Shanghai-based Mingxing film company, described
the Modern Girls favorite pastimes as the following:
Taking a boyfriend for a stroll at dusk under street lights that had just
come on; visiting the park with a boyfriend on a moon-lit night when
flowers are in full bloom; drinking coffee in a caf; going to the movies; and going dancing in the dance halls1

This enumeration of activities conjured up the image of a young

woman who could openly enjoy her amorous relationships with the
opposite sex and who, moreover, indulged in the many sensuous
pleasures offered by the urban playground. Frequenting such new
* Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the workshop on Affect,
Emotion and Public Life in Modern China and Japan at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, 5-7 May 2005; as an invited plenary address at the Eighth Annual
Graduate Symposium on Womens and Gender History at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign on 8 March 2007; and at the Womens Studies and East
Asian Gender Forum at the University of Michigan on 19 March 2007. I thank the
organizers of these events for inviting me and would like to acknowledge the stimulating comments and suggestions from many scholars, especially Catherine Yeh,
John Fitzgerald, Tani Barlow, Joan Judge, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Eugenia Lean, Bryna
Goodman, Joan Scott, Gary Xu, Marilyn Booth, Ellen Johnston Laing, Liang Luo,
Wang Zheng, Ying Zhang, and Valerie Traub. I owe a special debt of gratitude to
the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group at the University of Washington for sharing with me in August 2007 their manuscript of The Modern World Around
the World, a volume forthcoming from Duke University Press. The contributions by
Tani Barlow and Madeleine Yue Dong in this volume were especially inspiring.
Research for this chapter was undertaken with the support from the American
Council of Learned Societies and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation between 2002
and 2004. A fellowship at the Oregon Humanities Center in fall 2007 gave me the
necessary time to prepare this chapter for publication.
1
Li Hen, Kan, Ai Xia buda zizhao de kougong [Look, Ai Xia volunteered her
confession without being pressed], Mingxing yuebao 1, no. 3 (1933.7): 2; quoted in
Katherine Hui-ling Chou (Zhou Huiling), Biaoyan Zhongguo: N mingxing, biaoyan wenhua, shijue zhengzhi, 1910-1945 [Performing China: actresses, performance culture,
visual politics, 1910-1945] (Taipei: Maitian chuban, 2004), p. 79.

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tze-lan d. sang

city spaces as boulevards, parks, cafs, movie theaters and dance

halls, the Modern Girl had a romantic, hedonistic persona highly
visible in public.
But the Modern Girl, according to the reporter who penned this
1933 article, did not have to be just a pleasure-seeking libertine.
Commenting on Ai Xia, a movie actress who wrote the script for a
moviein which she also starredentitled A Modern Woman (Xiandai
yi nxing), the reporter claimed that while many Modern Girls in
Shanghai were modern only in appearance (pixang shifen modeng), Ai
Xia was different. In contrast to the superficial Modern Girls, who
might squander all their time frolicking, Ai Xia liked above all to
write in the quietude of her home, although of course she was also
practiced in the leisure activities typical of the modern youth. Her
writing was slick, pretty and thus feminine, but also piquant and
pithy. In other words, hers was an androgynous style that expressed
her modern womanhood. She had a modern substance that was
expressed through her creative writing.
This report from 1933 gives a good indication of the tensions
present in the social commentary on the Modern Girl in 1930s
China. Although the Modern Girl had been synonymous in the
popular imagination with hedonism and frivolity, Chinese commentators constantly felt compelled to suggest that she should be more
than, or other than, a decadent libertine. And although the Modern
Girl had been identifiable in major cities like Shanghai by a certain
trendy look, commentators often denigrated outward appearance as
superficial trappings and privileged inner qualities such as intellectualism and progressive thinking as the more authentic indices of
modern womanhood.2

2
Paradoxically enough, however, this particular story about Ai Xia also points
up the discrepancy between image and realitythe popular conception of the Modern Girl did not always jibe with the qualities of actual Modern Girls. Ai Xias literary endeavors highlighted the fact that in addition to certain conspicuous traits that
the Modern Girls may have shared in common, there were also qualities that one
would not normally associate with the Modern Girls that were nonetheless present
in some real-life Modern Girls. Nevertheless, the public, titillated by audacious sexuality and flagrant materialism, was quick to seize on such traits as the Modern Girls
defining features and was unprepared to admit the likelihood of diversity among the
Modern Girls. The Modern Girl, in other words, may have been a much maligned
figure, her multifaceted identity frequently reduced to a one-dimensional stereotype
in the public imagination.

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

181

The English term Modern Girl first surfaced in a small number

of Chinese sources such as fiction and journalism at the end of the
1920s. The New Sensationalist writer Xu Xiacun published a short
story titled Modern Girl (English in the original) in the journal
New Literature (Xin wenyi) in November 1929, and according to Leo
Lee, the previous year the Modern Girl had already been identified
in the North China Herald as a Chinese flappera young woman
dressed in semi-foreign style with bobbed hair short skirt . . . and
powdered face who has come to stay.3 By 1933, both the English
term and a variety of Chinese translations based on partial transliteration, including modeng nzi, modeng nlang and modeng xiaojie,
appeared to be in wide circulation.4 Chinese fascination with the
Modern Girl followed on the heels of a Japanese controversy from
the mid to late 1920s. According to Barbara Sato, the term Modern
Girl first appeared in Japan in its phonetic spelling, modan gru, in
1923. In the next several years, as publications proliferated on the
moga, which was how the modan gru was commonly called, contradictory expectations arose. Intellectuals generally expected the moga to
be an intellectual type interested in radical politics and the betterment of womens position in society, while other observers equated

Miriam Silverberg in her pioneering work on the Japanese Modern Girl has argued that the mogas were none other than professional, working women, who were
misrepresented by the mass media in a superficial and decadent light to mitigate the
ideological threat that they posed to the social order; see Silverberg, The Modern
Girl as Militant, in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 239-266. With reference to
1930s China, although I doubt that the Modern Girls and the professional women
were two completely overlapping categories, I would nonetheless note significant
cases where certain professional women were covered by the media as decadent
Modern Girls mainly because of their unconventional sexuality, while the other side
of their identities as accomplished professional women was marginalized in the media uproar. The medias fixation on the movie actresses Ai Xias and Ruan Lingyus
sexual relationships before and after their suicides in 1934 and 1935 are cases in
point. For related discussion, see Chou, Biaoyan Zhongguo, pp. 71-85, 102-112; Kristine Harris, The New Woman Incident: Cinema, Scandal and Spectacle in 1935
Shanghai, in Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), pp. 277-302.
3
Xu Xiacun, Modern Girl, in Yan Jiayan ed., Xin ganjuepai xiaoshuo xuan [A
selection of New Sensationalist fiction] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1985),
pp. 30-35. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in
China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 198.
4
The Chinese translations for Modern Girl were based on the transliteration
of modern as modeng.

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tze-lan d. sang

the moga with a group of empty-headed, promiscuous young women

preoccupied with trendy clothes and having fun.5 Regardless of
whether the Chinese interest in the Modern Girl was influenced by
the earlier Japanese discussion, in the early 1930s the term Modern
Girl joined other terms that had come into circulation in Chinese
earlier in the twentieth century to designate a new kind of woman
appearing on Chinas horizon.6
The new-style woman at the dawn of the twentieth century was
to the public mind typified by female revolutionaries, assassins, antifootbinding advocates, and women educators and students.7 In the
ensuing May Fourth New Culture erafrom the mid 1910s to mid
1920sshe was represented by educated women who strove to save
the nation while seeking their own sexual and economic autonomy. 8
However, in the early 1930s, the most powerful icon of new femininity had become movie starlets and other sexually alluring urban
women sporting the latest fashion and believed to revel in consumption and other urban amusements. A significant reason for this shift,
as Louise Edwards has shown, is that whereas previously the conceptualization of the modern woman had largely been the purview
of reformist intellectuals, during the 1920s and 1930s the modern
woman moved into the commercial sector, resulting in the intellec5
Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar
Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 57-59.
6
Earlier and concurrent Chinese terms for designating a new type of woman
include new-style woman (xinshi fun), new woman (xin nzi, xin fun, xin nxing),
and modern woman (jindai nzi, jindai nxing, xiandai nxing, shidai nuzi, shidai guniang).
7
Precisely what constituted the public in the late Qing is a thorny issue. Here
I primarily mean the reading public constituted by literate people who read locally
and nationally circulated newspapers, novels, textbooks, and so forth. On the making
of the new woman in China in the two decades leading up to May Fourth (and before the term xin nxing, or New Woman, achieved currency), especially on the
domestication of the images of Western women in the process, see Hu Ying, Tales of
Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). See also Joan Judge, Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western
Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Nan N 6, no. 1 (2004):
102-135; and Meng Mu Meets the Modern: Female Exemplars in Late-Qing Textbooks for Girls and Women, Jindai Zhongguo fun shi yanjiu (2000): 133-177.
8
The May Fourth New Woman demanded education and the freedom of love,
aspired to enter the professions, and participated in patriotic movements. See Amy
Dooling, Womens Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China (New York: Palgrave,
2005); Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

183

tual classs loss of monopolistic control over her definition.9 Advertising and imported Hollywood films created glamorous images of the
modern woman, spreading ever more seductive prototypes of new
femininity.10 The shift, then, in the popular image of the modern
woman from a reform-minded, patriotic intellectual to a glittering,
decadent consumer signaled the commodification of the everyday,
a de-radicalization of modernity.11 Granted that this interpretation
has to be qualified with the observation that modernity, in the first
place, was never purely an ideological and political formation but
rather had always been actualized in part through commercial practices and material culture, and that unconventional women flaunting
extravagant fashions and outrageous sexual behaviorhigh-class
courtesanshad been upheld by Shanghais entertainment press as
icons of modernity in as early as the late nineteenth century, 12 it
9
Louise Edwards, Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China, Modern
China 26, no. 2 (2000): 123. I take Edwardss point to be that the use of the modern
woman became pervasive in Chinese advertising in the 1920s and 1930s, not that it
originated in this period. Examining advertising calendar posters, Ellen Johnston
Laing has dated the first uses of the modern woman in Chinese advertising to 1914;
see Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century
Shanghai (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), pp. 102-104.
10
On the use of the modern woman in Chinese advertising, see Laing, Selling
Happiness; Carlton Benson, Consumers Are Also Soldiers: Subversive Songs from
Nanjing Road during the New Life Movement, in Sherman Cochran, Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945 (Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999), pp. 91-132; Sherman Cochran, Transnational Origins of
Advertising in Early Twentieth-Century China, in Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing
Road, pp. 41-44; Leo Lee, Shanghai Modern, pp. 77-80; Tani E. Barlow, Buying In:
Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, in
Modern Girl Around the World Research Group (Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M.
Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, Tani E. Barlow),
ed., The Modern Girl Around the World (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
11
I borrow the phrase commodification of the everyday from Barbara Satos
work on the women and consumerism (The New Japanese Woman, pp. 13-18). Taking
Shanghai as his focus, Leo Lee also emphasizes the significance of the everyday in
his understanding of urban modernity (Shanghai Modern, p. 74).
12
Catherine Yeh has recently made a strong case that the high-class courtesans
in the Foreign Settlements in Shanghai, Chinas first metropolis with a modern infrastructure, in the latter half of the nineteenth century managed to turn themselves
(with the help of a flourishing entertainment press) into highly-prized emblems of
modernity, through their trendsetting, extravagant fashion, conspicuous consumption of foreign goods, public social interactions, and identities as the citys first working women; the public attention showered on them in the entertainment press
overshadowed even reformist intellectuals modernizing agendas; see Catherine
Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910

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tze-lan d. sang

seems that by the early 1930s the commodification of the everyday

in Chinas fledgling capitalist economy reached a new intensity and
scope. This, coupled with the nations deepening sovereignty crisis
after Japans invasion of Manchuria and bombing of Shanghai in
1931 and 1932, demanded a response.13 In reaction to the commercialization and de-politicization of modern everyday life, both the
political left and the right seized on the Modern Girl as a symptomatic impediment to nation-building, an object in dire need of reproach
and reform.
From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, the Modern Girl made
frequent appearances in Chinese modernist literature and art as a
femme fatale, a metonymy for the modern metropolis that holds both
allure and hidden danger for the (male) explorer.14 In advertising,

(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2006). Although her findings
tantalizingly point us in the direction of considering the late-Qing Shanghai courtesan as a precursor of the Modern Girl, Yeh also makes it amply clear that precisely
because courtesans were not expected to be just like any other women, they were
given exceptional license as interpreters of the new. In other words, the threat that
their novel and outrageous public manners may have posed to the existing gender
structure was psychologically lessened to a tolerable degree for the public (Yeh,
Shanghai Love, pp. 32-33). In this respect, I find the situation with the 1930s Modern
Girl quite different, in that a significant number of social commentators and government officials expressed, with a rare keenness, their wish to restrain or police the
Modern Girls conduct, suggesting that they feared the Modern Girls persona was
contagious, her influence among the general population too far-reaching if unchecked.
13
Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and bombed Shanghai in January 1932.
On the development of modern material culture as well as literary culture in Shanghai, see Lee, Shanghai Modern. On vernacular modernity, using film culture as a primary example, see Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema,
1896-1937 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On the modernizing of commercial practices, see Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road.
14
Looking at literature, especially the modernist fiction by Shanghais New Sensationalist writers of the 1930s, Leo Lee and Shu-mei Shih have identified the Modern Girl as a femme fatale figure that symbolized both the enticements and the perils
of the modern metropolis; see Lee, Shanghai Modern; Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1838 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001). In visual culture, Madeleine Yue Dong finds that the Modern Girl was
caricatured as an object of both desire and fear in cartoons created by modernist
artists such as Ye Qianyu and Guo Jianying in magazines including Shanghai Sketch,
Times Cartoon, The Young Companion, and Womens Pictorial, depicted as having the power to either emasculate or confirm modern masculinity; Dong, Who is Afraid of
the Chinese Modern Girl? in Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, ed.,
The Modern Girl Around the World (forthcoming). On the Modern Girl in Chinese nonleftist as well as leftist cinema, see Zhang, An Amorous History, pp. 254-267.

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

185

she symbolized the luxurious, hygienic, and scientifically advanced

lifestyle of the middle class and the super wealthy.15 In response to
these dominant, glamorized images, left-wing filmmakers, critics and
other cultural workers, who were predominantly male, tried to subject the Modern Girl to discipline, some going so far as to advocate
that only a desexualized working-class heroine who was single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of the socialist revolution could be called
a real modern woman.16 Meanwhile, on the political right, the fascistic New Life Movement launched by Chiang Kai-shek, leader of
the ruling Nationalist Party, in 1934 also found in the Modern Girl
an embodiment of the material and spiritual degeneration of the
Chinese that had partly resulted from corrupting foreign influence.
Officials in several major cities introduced prohibitions to regulate
the Modern Girls body, by discouraging and penalizing women who
wore Western-style clothes, purchased foreign products, or exposed
parts of their bodies in public.17
Because of this complex history, current scholars approaches to
the Chinese Modern Girl of the 1930s have taken several paths.
Some scholars see the Modern Girl as a product of global capitalism.18 For instance, the collaborative research group Modern Girl
15

See Barlow, Laing, and Lee.

Film scholars, most importantly Yingjin Zhang, examining films and film criticism, have found that the Modern Girl, like the New Woman, was subjected to
discursive policing by leftist male cultural producers, whose paternalistic desire to
shape the modern woman to fit the mold of the ideal revolutionary subject ironically
showed a pattern of co-optation not far removed from the coercions of traditional
patriarchy; see Yingjin Zhang, Engendering Chinese Filmic Discourse of the 1930s:
Configurations of Modern Women in Shanghai in Three Silent Films, positions 2,
no. 3 (Winter 1994): 603-628.
17
Yen Hsiao-pei, Body Politics, Modernity and National Salvation: The Modern Girl and the New Life Movement, Asian Studies Review 29, no. 2 (June 2005):
165-186, especially p. 165. Yen argues that it was not until the New Life movement
in early 1934 that the Modern Girl identity became consolidated. An extreme example of the backlash against the Modern Girls was the public vandalism performed
by the Smashing Modernity Gang (Yen, p. 173).
18
For example, the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group claims, In
contrast to the New Woman who, in many contexts was her predecessor or contemporary, the Modern Girl was less often identified with directly advocating social
and political reform than with ostentatiously refashioning her appearance and refining her body; see Modern Girl Around the World Research Group: Tani E. Barlow, Madeleine Yue Dong, Uta G. Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Lynn M. Thomas and
Alys Eve Weinbaum, The Modern Girl around the World: A Research Agenda and
Preliminary Finings, Gender and History 17, no. 2 (August 2005): 249. However, this
16

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tze-lan d. sang

Around the World, which includes China historians Tani Barlow

and Madeleine Yue Dong, has recently maintained that the Chinese
Modern Girl was part of the global Modern Girl phenomenon,
which, besides being manufactured through the mass media and
modernist literary, aesthetic and political discourses, was to a large
degree produced through transnational capitalism inflected by imperial relations, especially through the consumer product campaigns
launched by multinational corporations. According to the group, In
cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to
New York . . . [w]hat identified Modern Girls was their use of specific commodities and their explicit eroticism. The Modern Girl
had a cosmopolitan look, which she created by combining and
reconfiguring aesthetic elements drawn from disparate national,
seems to me a pre-drawn conclusion given the commercial nature of the sources that
the group focuses on in the article, which are overwhelmingly advertisements for
consumer products (especially cosmetics and toiletries). For an attempt to schematically draw a clear distinction between the New Woman and the Modern Girl in the
Chinese context as symbolizing two conflicting sides of modernity, with the former
connoting nationalism and revolutionary spirit and the latter sexuality, cosmopolitanism and decadence, see Sarah E. Stevens, Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China, NWSA Journal 15.3 (2003): 82-103.
Although I think Stevens is perceptive when she states that the terms New Woman
and Modern Girl connoted different archetypes, I am rather of the opinion that
there was no absolute separation between the two categories and that they bled into
each other quite a bit. The term New Woman, in its broadest sense as the newstyle woman or modern woman, encompassed the Modern Girl as a subcategory.
Moreover, the New Woman, who in the May Fourth era represented individualism
and iconoclastic defiance against an oppressive tradition, was by the late 1920s and
early 1930s often perceived as romantic, impulsive, sensual and self-occupiedin
other words, fallen far short of the requirement for a truly revolutionary subject. In
this perception she was little different from the much criticized Modern Girl; see the
depiction of the New Woman writer Wei Ming in the film New Woman (directed by
Cai Chu-sheng, 1935); see also Rachel Hui-chi Hsu (Xu Huiqi), Nala zai Zhongguo:
Xin nxing xingxiang de suzao ji qi yanbian (1900s-1930s) [Nora in China: The construction of the new woman image and its evolution, 1900s-1930s] (Taipei: Guoli
Zhengzhi daxue lishixuexi, 2003), pp. 262-272. It should also be noted that the term
Modern Girl, though most frequently associated with urban consumption and the
leisure class, was also occasionally used to refer to educated women with career ambitions and social awareness. For instance, some 1930s critics commented on Ding
Ling as a writer who was herself immersed in the life of a Modern Girl and had a
deep understanding of the emotional, spiritual and economic turmoil experienced by
some Modern Girls in Chinas capitalistic cities; see Fang Ying, Ding Ling lun, in
Yuan Liangjun ed., Ding Ling yanjiu ziliao [Research material on Ding Ling] (Tianjin:
Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1982), pp. 237-245. See also the 1930s media discussion
on restoring a positive valence or correct meaning to the term modeng (modern) mentioned in Hsu, Nala zai Zhongguo, pp. 275-276.

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

187

colonial and racial regimes.19 Furthermore, examining the invention

and staging of a sexy Modern Girl image in the ads for industrial
commodities of multinational brands (such as Flint insect spray, Ditmar Brunner kerosene oil, Sunlight soap, Colgate perfume, Ponds
vanishing cream, Cutex nail polish, and Kotex menstrual pads) in
simple line drawings placed in Chinese newspapers and opinion
magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Barlow has found that the repetition of this icon in numerous ads contributed to redefining a luscious,
new and scientific femininity, and that vernacular theories of social
life and advertising iconography sutured modern personhood to
visual fantasies about commodity use in an imminent future via the
sexy Modern Girl icon.20
In contrast to these scholars emphasis on the instrumental role
of global capitalism in the making of the Modern Girl, and vice
versa, other scholars have focused on the local political significance
of the controversies over the Modern Girl, such as Chinese male
intellectuals debates over what constituted the ideal modern woman
during the 1930s referenced earlier. Yet another important approach
that has arisen aims to uncover the voices of actual Modern Girls in
sites such as womens magazines and womens literary works so as
to understand how Modern Girls participated in their self-definition
and how they resisted or negotiated with the paternalistic repression
coming from both the revolutionary left and the institutionalized
power of the right.21
Productive as these varied approaches have been, there are still
areas waiting to be explored. One such area is the question of what
other ideological work did the Modern Girl image perform besides
promoting consumerism and certain new ideas about the good life?
Another question is: what was the non-elite view of the Modern Girl,

19
Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, The Modern Girl Around
the World: A Research Agenda and Preliminary Findings, 245, 246.
20
Barlow, Buying In.
21
In addition to taking seriously the role of male intellectuals (as well as artists,
advertisers, etc.) in the creation and monitoring of the modern womans image, as
Louise Edwards and others have done, I believe the role of modern women themselves in fashioning their own public image deserves to be reckoned with. For worthwhile attempts in this direction, see Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment; Dooling,
Womens Literary Feminism; Chou, Biaoyan Zhongguo; Lingzhen Wang, Personal Matters:
Womens Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Yen, Body Politics.

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from the vantage point of the ordinary ranks of urban society instead
of the vantage point of the economic, cultural and political elites (i.e.,
the leisure class, the new professional middle class, political leaders,
modernist writers and artists, leftist intellectuals, etc.)? To begin to
crack these problems, I find looking at popular fiction, that is, commercial, entertainment fiction written in a trite semi-traditional format, whose first publication is often through serialization in
newspapers and magazines, instructive. If, as Barlow claims, the sexy
Shanghai Modern Girl icon placed in scenes of daily tasks in corporate advertising signified everyday life in the most advanced sector,
and that this icon, through its inviting eroticism, drew the viewer in
to fantasize the pleasure of using expensive industrial commodities,
thus effecting his or her imaginary identification (not to mention
ideological interpellation) as a modern bourgeois subject, then how
do we account for the fact that Chinese popular fiction of the same
era was not satisfied with constructing simple eroticized and pleasurable scenes involving the Modern Girl, choosing to compound them,
instead, with stories about the elusiveness of the Modern Girl ideal
and the difficulty of becoming the Modern Girl? Indeed, how do we
explain the curious occurrence of stories about wannabe Modern
Girls and their failure in popular fiction? Does the contrast between
advertising and commercial fiction merely reflect the difference in
complexity between simple line drawings and long, heteroglossic
novels? Or is commercial fiction giving us a rare non-elite view of
the Modern Girl, a view from the vantage point of the lower-middle
rungs of urban society, outside the leisure class and the new professional middle class? Is it possible that commercial entertainment fiction, unlike advertising, did not automatically endorse urban
consumer culture after all but rather harbored a stern criticism of
Chinas developing capitalist economy and social order in the interwar years?
The Failed Modern Girl
To be sure, failed Modern Girls can be spotted in Chinese elite literature and visual representation, most notably in leftist literature
and film. In leftist discourse, the failure of Modern Girls usually
consists of their inability to transform themselves from romantic,

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

189

hedonistic, and self-occupied bourgeois subjects into revolutionary

subjects who can suppress their own desires in the service of national
salvation and the larger social good. The bourgeois Modern Girls
self-indulgence and weakness of character not only make her fail her
social responsibility but may in some cases even lead to her personal
downfall. Well-known examples of such portrayal include the 1933
film Three Modern Women (Sange modeng nxing) and the 1935 film New
Woman (Xin nxing).22 The protagonist of the latter film, a young
woman writer whose personal and professional lives are in shambles,
is noticeably created through the splicing, or doubling, of two female
archetypes: the decadent, extravagant female consumer, and the
distraughteven suicidaleducated woman whose search for meaning and happiness in society is thwarted.23 The latter archetype had
been a veritable fixture in Chinese womens writings since the early
1920s. In short stories and novels that are often autobiographical,
women writers dwelled on the emotional and professional dilemmas
that educated, middle-class women experienced in a society slow to
change. Their fictional alter-egos are alienated from family and society, feel ambivalent about modern love and marriage, and find themselves overwhelmed by the sexual prejudices and barriers facing a
woman pursuing a career in the public realm. Quite often, these
fictional heroines buckle under the dual stress of romantic disillusionments and professional setbacks, and their inability to reconcile lofty
aspirations with sordid reality culminates in psychosomatic consequences ranging from self-loathing and self-pity, to illness, madness,

22
For readings of these films, see Zhang, Engendering Chinese Filmic Discourse; Zhang, An Amorous History, pp. 262-267. Three Modern Women is scripted by
Tian Han, in whose plays the Modern Girl appears frequently as the vamp opposite
innocent, unspoiled folk women; see Liang Luo, The Theatrics of Revolution: Tian Han
(1898-1968) and the Cultural Politics of Performance in Modern China (unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, Harvard University, 2006), pp. 178-202.
23
The main protagonist Wei Mings extravagance and pleasure-seeking qualities
are as central to the film as her status as an educated woman. She is no stranger to
dancing in dance halls as a form of entertainment; at one point she invites her love
interest to go dancing with her, an invitation he rejects as hedonistic. She uses cosmetics. She also owns more fancy clothes than she can wear, which late in the film
she tries to pawn to come up with the money to cure her sick daughter. When Dr.
Wang, an unwelcome suitor, presents her with a large diamond ring to propose marriage, she is momentarily enticed by the ring before rejecting it on the grounds that
she prefers freedom to the bondage of marriage.

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and death.24 The archetype of the perturbed educated modern

woman pioneered by female writers was subsequently appropriated
by male leftist writers such as Mao Dun as a literary subject in the
late 1920s.25 It became further overlaid with the image of the decadent, materialistic female consumer in the 1930s as leftist intellectuals sought to expose the multiple failings of the bourgeois Modern
Girl.
Interesting as this elite discourse on the failed bourgeois Modern
Girl may be, I am drawn to another type of failure, which appeared
frequently in Chinese popular literature after the late 1920s: the
tragic failure of lower-class urban girls to ascend to middle-class
status, after having first been seduced by the alluring images of the
bourgeois Modern Girl to try to become the same. It is something
of a clich that Chinese popular fiction (tongsu xiaoshuo)especially
the genres that concerned themselves with love (qing)of the first
few decades of the twentieth century often constructed sharply contrasting images of women, juxtaposing a woman of the new style
with one of the old style, posing a difficult dilemma for the man
caught between the old and new feminine ideals, only to subtly
rebuke the new-style woman and ultimately affirm the desirability
and moral superiority of traditional womanhood.26 Contrary to these
familiar scholarly assertions, I have found that many early-twentiethcentury Chinese popular novelists were less interested in erecting
and upholding old/new dichotomies than in exploring the permeability and uncertainty of boundaries. Thus, they conjured up situations in which girls who have grown up in poverty in the cities,
24

See Wendy Larson, Women and Writing in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction
(West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2004); Dooling, Womens Literary Feminism,
especially chapters 2-3. On educated, middle-class womens suicides outside literature, especially the presss presentation of them, see Bryna Goodman, The New
Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory, and the New Republic,
Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 1 (February 2005): 67-101, and Appealing to the Public: Newspaper Presentation and Adjudication of Emotion, Twentieth-Century China
31, no. 2 (April 2006): 32-69.
25
Amy Dooling perceptively points out that the male leftist writer Mao Dun appropriated the New Woman as a literary subject from the pioneering fiction by
women writers Lu Yin and Bing Xin (Womens Literary Feminism, pp. 72-73).
26
On popular fiction writers common use of opposite types of women to represent the dilemma between tradition and modernity, see E. Perry Link, Jr., Mandarin
Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), 37, 208.

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

191

whom most readers may have been quick to regard as imprisoned

in a traditional way of life and insulated from new, progressive ideas,
are in fact either tempted or compelled to cross the line into the
realm of the modern. The polar opposite images of women constructed by these popular writers, therefore, are frequently not so
much about the conflict between old and new values as about socioeconomic disparity. By exploring the porous borders of modern
space, lifestyle and identities, the plot of the lower-class girls wistful
identification with the middle-class Modern Girl opens up the question of class mobility, asking whether modern womanhood is within
the reach of urban girls of humble origins.
While admitting that this plot, as a fictional construct, cannot be
taken to be mimetic of reality in any uncontested sense, it is nonetheless informative, for it was one of the bestselling formulas discovered
by entertainment fiction writers in an age of expanding consumerism,
a product that many ordinary readers, including girls and women,
not only bought but may have also bought into on a fatasmatic
level. Indeed, it may have been precisely through this recurring novelistic scenario of desire and abjection that many young women and
men of moderate education and means negotiated their troubled
relations to modernityrelishing the validation, by the novelistic
scenario, of the middle-class way of life which they themselves aspired
to and may have only partially attained, while also feeling their compassion aroused and exercised for those who fail to climb up the
social ladder, thus deducing sobering warnings against the perils of
new class formations and the limits of class mobility in capitalism.
The recurring popular plot accentuated issues that were seldom
addressed by elite writers experimenting with much more Westernized narrative forms than the linked-chapter novel. Modernist writers
such as Shanghais New Sensationalists of the 1930s largely ignored
the urban poor as a subject, and their ambivalent representations of
the Modern Girl often operated to obscure, rather than lay bare, the
classed nature of this new gender construct. Leftist writers, with their
heightened awareness of class issues, on the other hand, were often
too eager to create ideal working-class characters that fit the mold
of their preconceived notions of proletarian resistance and revolutionary consciousness that they failed to face squarely the urban
poors possible embrace of capitalist modernity. The popular plot of
the lower-class urban girls battle to forge a modern bourgeois iden-

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tity, in short, tells a side of the Modern Girl story rarely told by elite
sources.
Popular novels that contain this plotthe lower-class urban girls
struggle to gain a modern identityare many. Pioneering in this
regard are the social romantic novels by Zhang Henshui (1895-1967),
one of the most prolific and popular Chinese writers of the twentieth
century. Between the late 1920s and the outbreak of Chinas War
of Resistance against Japan in 1937, Zhang wrote, among other
things, about a dozen novels with strong romantic themes set in
complex social tableaux. In some of these novels, an enormous
amount of political and social news, including urban myths and legends, is loosely interwoven with the protagonists love relationships,
the social and romantic narrative strands remaining clearly distinguishable from each other. Others are more tightly constructed
around the protagonists romantic relationships, which, however, are
shown to be embedded in and constrained by the larger social environment.27 This second class of novels, which are tightly constructed
around a small number of characters, draw especially memorable
portraits of poor urban young women who aspire to participate in
the modern way of life symbolized by the Modern Girl.
The city that takes center stage in the majority of these novels is
Beijing (its name was officially changed by the Nationalist government to Beiping in 1928), which comes alive in Zhangs depictions
as a city rife with violent new class formations. Since the collapse of
the Qing Empire in 1911, the fortunes of the former Manchu aristocracy have rapidly declined, whereas tens of thousands of lowerclass Manchu families, who previously relied on the Manchu
governments stipends, are now stipendless, without proper profes27
Here I agree with the critic Zhao Xiaoxuans observation that Zhangs social
romantic novels largely fall into two categories. The first she calls chuancha daliang
shehui yiwen de yanqing xiaoshuo, or novels that interweave lots of social news with love
stories. The second she calls yi shehui wei changjing de yanqing xiaoshuo, or romantic novels with social backdrops. Zhao further notes that, besides social romantic novels,
novels in other genres by Zhang such as martial arts novels and war novels usually
also contain significant romantic plots. Zhang apparently understood love to be one
of a few narrative elements of universal appeal to readers; see Zhao Xiaoxuan, Zhang
Henshui xiaoshuo xinlun [A study on Zhang Henshuis novels] (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 2002), p. 90, p. 66, p. 64. On the blurring of boundaries between news
and fiction in Zhangs earlier novels, see Eileen Chow, Spectacular Novelties: News
Culture, Zhang Henshui, and Practices of Spectatorship in Republican China (unpublished
Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2000), chapter 2.

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

193

sions, and descending into sheer poverty. Meanwhile, several new

social groups are rising. A new official class has come into being and
is constantly being reconstituted, which comprises the military men
and bureaucrats who fill the ranks of the series of warlord governments seated in Beijing after the first three presidencies (between
1912 and 1917) of the new republic end either in disastrous attempts
to restore monarchy or in military coups. Also on the ascent is the
new bourgeoisie, which consists of wealthy businessmen, bankers,
Beijing opera stars as well as a new professional class that includes
doctors, lawyers, professors, writers, artists, office clerks that work
for foreign firms, etc., who are usually either foreign-educated or
have received Westernized education in China. Likewise belonging
in the bourgeoisie are the university students, many of whom are the
children of the provincial landed class sent by their well-to-do families to Beijing to receive an elite modern education. After these, on
the lower-middle and low rungs, one finds city residents who run
small businesses, hold service jobs, are involved in the entertainment
industries or handicrafts production, or are simply without work and
barely hobbling along at the subsistence level. Few work in factories,
for Beijing has not developed a significant modern industrial sector
comparable to those of the treaty ports such as Tianjin and
Shanghai.
It is in this volatile social landscape that we encounter the lowerclass girl who has grown up in the traditional alleyways and courtyard houses of Beijing, who, despite being a native of the city, faces
the challenge of finding a way to fit into its transforming economy
and moral milieu so as to survive. Despite her lack of educationthe
foremost requisite for the modern woman as the Westernized elite
defines herthe poor girl must seek membership in modern womanhood by whatever means available to her, for this is the only way to
eke out a decent living. Far from being exempt from the Westernizing changes taking place in the city, she is embroiled in them, at
times even an unwilling hostage to these changes.
For example, in Zhang Henshuis novel Heaven and Earth (Tianshang
renjian, 1928), an unlikely love triangle emerges among a poor laundry girl named Chen Yuzi, an England-returned university professor,28
28
Zhou Xiufeng, the protagonist of Heaven and Earth, mentions early in the novel
that he has studied in the United States; however, later in the novel, he is explicitly

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and the daughter of a wealthy overseas Chinese businessman who

has relocated to Beijing for a high position in the government. One
of Yuzis female companions has just gotten married to a government
bureaucrat and thus has ascended to a comfortable middle-class status. Her marriage and upward flight have made a deep psychological
impact on Yuzi, who possesses just as much natural beauty and grace
as does her friend. Yuzis hidden wishes for marrying into a higher
class than her own become attached to Zhou Xiufeng, a handsome
Westernized university professor who lives in the apartment/dormitory adjacent to the traditional courtyard house which Yuzi, her
mother and her little sister share with some other poor families. The
attraction is actually mutual, for Xiufeng, in spite of his own Western
learning and habits, is charmed by Yuzis traditional virginal beauty
and is flattered by her exquisite needlework in the traditional clothing that he deliberately orders from her family. Although he has
never so much as exchanged a word with her, he feels as though he
knows her quite well, for he constantly sees her at work through her
window from his, and vice versa.
Eventually Yuzi and Xiufeng manage to have a few brief exchanges
and even a couple of secret rendezvous without the knowledge of
Yuzis old-fashioned mother. On their dates, Xiufeng gives Yuzi a
taste of new-style life and courtship rituals: he takes her to a photography studio to have their pictures taken together, takes her to a
coffee shop for conversation and dessert, and also buys her a pair of
fashionable high-heel leather shoes. After their dates, Yuzi, considering herself committed to Xiufeng, begins diligently, as he advises, to
overcome her illiteracy by learning characters, and even sends two
messengers to feel out Xiufengs intentions regarding marriage. However, Xiufeng is held back from making a marriage proposal by
considerations of Yuzis lack of education and his worry that she will
not be able to fit in his elite social circles. His hesitation is further
aided by the fact that an extravagant Modern Girl by the name of
Huang Lihua, the daughter of a filthily rich overseas Chinese businessman now residing in Beijing, is fervently pursuing him because
she considers the cultural capital that he possesses as a respected
described as having returned from England instead of America; see Zhang Henshui,
Tianshang renjian (Taiyuan: Beiyue wenyi chubanshe, 1993), p. 8, p. 235. The contradictory information is probably a result of Zhang losing track of the biography that
he intended for this character.

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

195

professor and famous poet ideal for complementing her familys

wealth and refining her social status. Xiufeng gradually falls into
Lihuas snare of love while Yuzi, feeling slighted and disappointed
by Xiufeng, convinces her family to move away from the city to the
countryside.
Much to readers dismay, Zhang Henshui left off writing Heaven
and Earth just when the conflict between the two love affairs has come
to a head, never to finish it.29 However, the romantic entanglement
of people of disparate social stations in this novel would later be
mirrored and even surpassed by the love quadrangle in Zhangs
national bestseller two years laterFate in Tears and Laughter (Tixiao
yinyuan, 1930). Even more intriguing, although on the surface Zhang
has arranged in Heaven and Earth a contrast between a rich Modern
Girl and a poor traditional girl, that contrast is greatly tempered or
undermined by another motif: the lower-class girls experimentation
with new-style (i.e., modern) practices, such as free love (ziyou lianai),
companionate marriage, education, picture-taking, lounging at cafs,
and Western-style accoutrements. And this motifthe lower-class
urban girls mimicking of new-style practiceswould reappear in
other social romantic novels by Zhang. The frequent repetition of
this motif in some of the most widely read novels after the late 1920s
suggests that, a full decade after the beginnings of the May Fourth
New Culture Movement (which might be symbolically marked as
1915, the year that the iconoclastic journal Xin qingnian, or New Youth,
was established), Chinas Westernized new elites ideas of modern
femininity have become commonplace in the cities, such that it
seemed plausible to ordinary readers that even lower-class young
women would have been exposed to these ideas and wished to follow
them. The question dramatized by this novelistic motif, then, is no
longer whether new-style femininity is desirablefor it clearly isbut who has the qualifications and the means to forge a new-style
female identity.
In practical terms, since it costs a fortune to acquire a Western
education and other Western-style commodities (i.e., identity accessories) in a society marked by quasi-colonial hierarchies, the newstyle, Westernized femininity promoted by the elite is virtually out
29
The novels serialization in The Beijing Morning Newspaper (Beijing chenbao) in 1928
stopped before the denouement.

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of the reach of poor urban women, who may live in daily physical
proximity to the Westernized elite but cannot close the social gap
without an unexpected lift from the elite. Zhang toys with this paradox of the modern urban condition, pitting the everyday intimacy
among disparate social groups manifest in the close interactions
among them necessitated by the divisions of labor and by wayward
human desire against the new elites need to constantly maintain
class distinctions and reinforce its own hegemonic status.
An especially harrowing variation on the motif of the lower-class
urban girls precarious pursuit of a modern identity is the scenario
in which she is actively hailed by the citys changing economy and
moral milieu only to find herself inserted into one of the new eroticized female positions that the transforming economy has reserved
for women from disadvantaged backgrounds. Such is the story in
Zhangs novel The Palace of Art (Yishu zhi gong, 1935-1937), in which
an aging acrobats daughter has to find a way to support herself and
her father after his sudden physical collapse during a street performance. Because of her lack of education, she is unable to find any
profitable employment in the city until two female neighbors recruit
her to become a nude model like themselves for art classes in a
Western-style art academy. She decides to take the job but dares not
reveal the fact to her father or other neighbors. Whenever she strips
her clothes to pose in front of the art students and teachers, she has
to muster every bit of her courage to suppress her shame. She would
like to believe that modeling is an honorable, modern form of
employment and that she is sacrificing herself for the lofty goal of
creating art, because the income is simply too good to turn down.
However, she soon realizes the disturbing fact that some of the male
teachers and students, who ogle her full curves and white flesh, are
fighting one another over her, and would do anything in their power
to turn her into a simple object for visual and other pleasures. What
makes a bad situation worse is that her father, upon finding out what
her new service job in the school actually entails, considers her exhibiting of her body in front of groups of men even worse than what a
prostitute of the lowest class does, and furiously denounces her,
threatening to kill her. Feeling isolated and helpless, she acquiesces
to a slick art students scheme and becomes his mistress in the hope
of marriage. However, she is soon abandoned, discovers that her
father has moved away from their old neighborhood out of shame

failed modern girls in early-20th-century china

197

and died alone among strangers, is approached by a painter at the

Palace of Art studio like a strumpet, and loses her sanity.
The modern veneer of nude modelingadmittedly a novel profession that had never before existed in Chinais thus betrayed by
persistent, centuries-old male objectification of women.30 The poor
girls effort to enter and contribute to a Westernizing economy and
culture initially rewards her with good pay but ends up exploiting
and degrading her. Modernityhere, specifically, new concepts of
wage labor (e.g., compensation for service by the hour), of a womans
rightful control over her own body, and of the acceptable ways of
public display and gazeironically operates like a trap to catch her
like a beautiful insect, torturing her first before crushing her with
one blow. The Westernized elites rhetoric about modern, civilized
practice holds out to her the promise that there has emerged a new
scopic economy different from the old one predicated on the commodification of womens bodies. Yet she is reduced to a commodity
all the same, losing all control over her body and mind even outside
the workspace of the art class/studio.
The motif of the seduction of the lower-class urban girl by new
gender practices and positions to ambiguous ends is by no means
unique to Zhang Henshuis novels. It can also be found, in fact, in
some other social romantic novels by less-known writers of commercial fiction. One of them is Wang Dulu (1909-1977), who is most
familiar to contemporary readers for his marital arts fiction, which
has enjoyed a revival since 2000 because of Ang Lees film adaptation of Wangs Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long, 1941).
Besides martial arts fiction, Wang wrote quite a few social romantic
novels, most of which are set in Beijing, his native city, of the prewar
era.31 Whether consciously or not, he revisited the motif of the lowerclass Beijing girls precarious quest for a modern identity that had
been developed earlier by Zhang Henshui.
Elsewhere I have already pointed out that Wangs imagination for
social romantic fiction pivoted around the lower-class young women
30
On the controversy over the introduction of the nude as an artistic subject and
the use of nude models in Chinas Westernized art academies in the 1920s, see Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 44-46.
31
The majority of Wangs novels were serialized in Qingdao newspapers between 1938 and early 1945 and issued in book form in 1948.

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of Beijing. I have also given a detailed reading of Wangs incisive

yet bitter analysis of lower-class urban womens chances of becoming
the Modern Girl based on his postwar novel Fragrant Buds on a Splendid
Market (1948). 32 Here, for the purpose of illustration, I would like to
turn to his very first work in the genre, The Wafting Scent of Fallen
Catkin (Luo xu piao xiang, 1939-40), which examines the economically
disadvantaged urban girls chances of partaking in the modern, middle-class way of life, which promises consumerist agency and permits
free love, self-chosen marriage, non-romantic friendship with the
opposite sex, and non-exploitative work. The protagonist Fan Juying
is a beautiful, smart and sweet-tempered girl cursed by poverty. The
sixteen-year-old lives with her uncle and aunt in the Haidian suburb
of Beijing, where several prestigious universities are located, while
her mother works as a domestic inside the city. She falls in love with
Qin Pu, an auditor at a university nearby, but her avaricious uncle
objects to the love affair because Pu is not wealthy. Pining for a
modern lifestyle as well as love, and unable to resist the temptation
of fashionable dresses, jewelry and other expensive gifts, Juying is
soon seduced by a friend of Pus, the wealthy, handsome modern
boy Zhang Shaojie. He treats her as a plaything and deserts her in
due course. The callous Shaojie even drives his car recklessly and
accidentally injures Juyings mother when the mother pleads him not
to leave them. After her mother dies from the injuries, Juying is left
with no economic support. She therefore agrees to her uncles
arrangement to go to another city to work in a factory, not realizing
that she is in fact being sold into prostitution. After enduring dehumanizing work, torture, imprisonment and illness for over a year,
Juying encounters a former neighbor and is rescued and sent back
to Beijing. She dies of tuberculosis, despite being reunited with Pu.
This melodramatic story, admittedly, could have been no more
than a hackneyed tale of a vainglorious, materialistic girl who changes
her heart, betrays her true love, and suffers the consequences. How32
Tze-lan D. Sang, Wang Dulus jingwei nxing chengzhang xiaoshuo [The
female Bildungsroman in Wang Dulus Beijing-flavored fiction], in Chen Pingyuan
and Wang Der-wei, eds., Beijing: Dushi xiangxiang yu wenhua jiyi [Beijing: Urban imagination and cultural memory] (Beijing: Beijing University, 2005), pp. 209-233; Tzelan D. Sang, Womens Work and Boundary Transgression in Wang Dulus Popular
Novels, in Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of
Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2005), pp. 287-308.

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ever, Wang Dulu chooses to turn it into a tale of genuine pathos

about the fatal attraction of modernity. The long inner monologues
he creates for Juying endow her with full humanity, enabling us to
see that she has the right to be sickened by her dingy, unsanitary
and vulgar home environment and to envy the carefree ways of the
university students she sees daily in the streets. She also has the right
to change her heart to choose Shaojie over Pu, since a womans right
to choose her partner rather than blind loyalty to one man is essential
to the modern practice of love, and since Shaojie by all indications
is better equipped than Pu to secure for her the modern lifestyle she
desperately desires. Unlike Pu the auditor, Shaojie is a matriculated
student at a university; he woos her with irresistible romantic language; most importantly, he has the necessary financial means to
support a modern bourgeois lifestyle. Long conditioned by her harsh
environment to be sensitive to the power of money, Juying understands that the modern lifestyle, the lifestyle of the most advanced
sector in society, is inextricable from money as its foundation. That
she is deceived, deserted and later trafficked like goods is through
no fault of her own. Her only mistake is that she has aspired to
become a modern subject, a goal illusive and difficult to reach from
her social position.
Conclusion
Both Zhang Henshui, the king of social romantic fiction of Republican China, and a lesser novelist like Wang Dulu, produced fascinating stories about lower-class young urban women who are embroiled
in the citys modernization/Westernization. Although in their telling,
these girls upward movement to the middle-class Modern Girl status
often ends in frustration and defeat, I have contended that it makes
less sense to dismiss them as old-style women or as remnants of the
old society than to see them as what they are: failed Modern Girls. 33
The story of the failed Modern Girl is significant both for the anxi33
In this regard, I disagree with Zhao Xiaoxuans characterization of the majority of women occupying center stage in Zhang Henshuis fictionactresses, prostitutes, singers and storytellers, dance troupe members, and modelsas women of
the old society (Zhao, Zhang Henshui xiaoshuo pinglun). I argue that, in fact, Zhang
makes it clear that many of these women are the products of modernization and assume a modern veneer in the eyes of the people around them.

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eties about new class formations that may have been articulated for
many an ordinary reader of the early twentieth century, and because,
during the historical process of modernization, failed Modern Girls
may have far outnumbered the successful ones, the Modern Girl
having been a provocative ideational and iconographic construct in
intellectual discourse and the mass media before becoming a widespread social reality. The failed Modern Girls failure, as hinted by
both Zhang and Wang, is attributable at least in part to the selfadjusting modalities of patriarchy. They intimate that the Modern
Girl is constantly an unfinished and/or undone project in a world
of evolving gender subordination. Furthermore, both authors insist
that the Modern Girl is not just a new gender but also a new class
category, an identity so thoroughly defined by socioeconomic privilege that it constantly provokes fantasy and mimicry but is virtually
impossible to inhabit for those with lesser means. Although recent
scholarship has suggested that the Modern Girl look was widely copied across class lines in the 1930s and threatened to slash class
distinctions,34 the popular novels from the period emphasized that
the process of becoming the Modern Girl involved more than just
the imitation of the Modern Girl look. It required no less than the
reinvention of ones familial and social networks.
Although the popular novels heart-rending endings may impart
a profound pessimism and appear to foreclose the possibility of social
change, yet, ultimately, any sympathy that such tragic tales of abject
modern subjects may have incited in the reader would have hinged
on a shared acceptance of equal opportunity and equal access
which overcomes existing gender and class differencesas intrinsically just. The stories pathos and affective powertheir entertainment
value, in other wordsdepended on the readers willing adoption
of the stories premise that some girls born into urban squalor may
be just as intelligent and beautiful as most bourgeois Modern Girls,
but that their social circumstances fail to do justice to their innate
potential and sterling personal qualities. This assumption, which distinguishes the essence of the human being from her place in the
social grid represents in itself a modern, revolutionary value, which
is a key foundation for the arguments for social equality, social jus-

34

Dong, Who is Afraid of the Chinese Modern Girl?

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201

tice, and democracy.35 In this sense, the popular plot of the failed
Modern Girl is far from conservative; it carried, in fact, a radical
message in its sentimental design.
That such sentimental pulp fiction whose paramount purpose was
entertainment carried such a radical message may not be so surprising after all if we could only open ourselves to the possibility that
capitalist popular culture, instead of being an opiate for the masses,
is a site of struggle full of contradictions. Popular culture bears the
mark of both the dominant ideology but also the everyday guerrilla
tactics that the people use to evade and to resist it, as John Fiske has
argued.36 The sign of popular resistance in the Chinese popular plot
of the failed Modern Girl becomes all the more tangible when we
compare it with elite writers representations of the wannabe Modern
Girl from the same era. Ding Ling, whose early creative work revolved
around the troubles of the middle-class modern woman, is the best
case in point. Her 1928 collection of short fiction, In the Darkness (Zai
heian zhong), consists of three stories about the middle-class modern
womans emotional and professional predicaments and a fourth about
a country lasss envy for the middle-class modern woman. Titled
The Lass Amao (Amao guniang), this last story is one of a very limited
number of pieces of new literature to touch on the lower-class
womans wistful identification with and emulation of the bourgeois
modern woman. The storys uniqueness notwithstanding, Amaos
envy is focused predominantly on the outer trappings of the bourgeois
modern woman, and she remains ignorant throughout of many bourgeois modern womens intellectual pursuits, vocational ambitions,
and frustrations. When a celestial-like modern woman residing in a
Western-style villa near Amaos shabby house dies of consumption,
it fills Amao with an inexplicable sense of futility. Death, the great
leveller, forces upon Amao the realization that even the happiness
of the bourgeois modern woman is transient and immaterial, so she
quietly languishes and dies herself. The message that comes to the

35

See the chapter by John Fitzgerald in the present volume.

John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 19-21.
Fiskes theory of popular culture is mainly made with reference to popular culture in
English-speaking industrial societies. However, my case study of early-twentiethcentury Chinese popular novels has convinced me of its relevance here. On the everyday guerilla tactics of the weak, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
36

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fore in such a plot, then, is a rather nihilistic one. It is not so much

about Amaos innate potential to become a modern subject and the
injustice of her restrictive poverty as about the fundamental vacuity
of the modern bourgeois life, or for that matter, life in general. It is
as if, by tearing down the modern bourgeoisies edifice of happiness
and plenitude, Ding Ling could eliminate the source of Amaos discontent, or all social discontent. Death makes Amao and her wealthy
neighbour equal, but it is an equality that is so annihilating as to lose
social relevance and transformative power.

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part three
PERFORMING ARTS AND GENDER ROLE-PLAYING

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205

POLITICS, ART, AND EROTICISM: THE FEMALE

IMPERSONATOR AS THE NATIONAL CULTURAL
SYMBOL OF REPUBLICAN CHINA
Catherine Vance Yeh

Introduction
Among the major objectives of the 1912 Republican Revolution in
China was to keep a unified country with a democratic political
system headed by a creditable president to symbolize the new political and moral order; to allow a free press to spread Republican ideas
throughout the country as was already the case in the Treaty Ports;
and, most importantly, to win the acceptance and support of the
international community, especially of the Powers, that were dominating world affairs. As is well known, the realization of these goals
remained decades away, and when Sun Yat-sen, who for a few weeks
had been the first President of the Republic, died in 1924, there was
only a single foreign representative with ambassadorial rank in Peking,
the Soviet ambassador Lev Kharakan.
In a seemingly utterly unconnected field, however, much of this
international acceptance was achieved. At the center of this advancement was a most unlikely figure: the dan, the male Peking opera actor
who enacted female roles. With the rise of the dan during the first
two decades of the Republican period, represented above all by Mei
Lanfang (1894-1961), a new kind of symbol of unified China emerged
(Figure 7.1). In a stunning merger of the tastes of widely divergent
segments of society, the beautiful male performer of female roles in
Peking opera rose to national stardom and had by the late 1920s
become the new aestheticized erotic symbol of the nation. In staging,
performing, and in translating his physical beauty and erotic appeal
into the image of the Chinese female ideal, Mei Lanfang succeeded
more than anyone else in becoming the emblem of the refinement
of Chinese culture. While the Chinese state and leadership continued
to fare badly abroad, Mei Lanfang was internationally appreciated
and applauded across a broad spectrum, ranging from Japanese busi-

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Figure 7.1. Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in Pavilion of the Royal Monument (Yu
bei ting); from Mei Shaowu, ed., Mei Lanfang ([Pictorial album] Mei Lanfang) (Beijing:
Beijing chubanshe, 1997).

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ness tycoons to American avant-garde dramatists and Soviet revolutionary artists. This chapter will trace the process through which this
new transgendered national symbol developed, and the transnational
nature of this development.
From Private Call-Boy to National Flower: The Career of the Female
Impersonator in the Newly-Constructed Cultural Hierarchy
What were the social forces behind the reshaping of the public image
of the dan from that of a male prostitute to that of national star? The
rise of the female impersonator to a leading position in the hierarchy
of Peking opera came to contemporaries as a shock, and led some
to believe that the order of the world had truly become unstuck.1
The derogatory term use for the dan was renyao, or demon in human
guise, a colloquial slur for transvestites. Since its beginning in the
eighteenth century, Peking opera had been dominated and led by
actors playing the laosheng or senior male roles. Patronized by the
Qing emperors and the nobility, these laosheng were at the center of
artistic and political power in the world of entertainment. The female
impersonators were traditionally trained and treated as male courtesans in establishments called xianggong tangzi.2 Few of them made it
in their profession past their youth as plenty of younger good-looking
apprentices were waiting in the wings to replace them. Their reputation for being call-boys and sexual playthings of rich and powerful
1
Zhang Cixi, Mei mu zhi bin [The funeral of Mei [Lanfangs] grandmother],
from his Yan guilai yi suibi, in Zhang Cixi, ed., Qingdai Yandu liyuan shiliao [Historical materials on Peking theaters [and actors] in the Qing period] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1988), p. 1235.
2
After the official discontinuation and banning of courtesan entertainment for
officials by the Qing, the link with boy actors as sexual and entertainment partners
of elite men took on institutional similarities to that of the courtesan entertainments. The boys were referred to as xiaochang, or xianggong, and the entertainment
establishments in which they lived, which began during the Ming, were called siyu or
xianggong tangzi. These establishments functioned in the same way as courtesan
houses. The boys would be called to attend dinner parties, to sit by their clients, pour
wine and sing a little if they could. These establishments were located on known
streets in the capital and the sexual nature of their business was understood. This is
not to reduce this lifestyle and entertainment to a meat market relationship. Deep
passion, love and attachments were formed, with some being legendary and well
documented. The siyu as an establishment was abolished in the first year of the Republic in 1912 pursuant to a petition from actors who felt that these establishments
were not proper for the new times and their new dignity as citizens and artists.

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men in the capital was well established. Up to the Republican period,

this was very much an openly acknowledged part of their profession.3
If the stature of the laosheng had been directly connected with the
court, the dan owed their rise to new and powerful players the
media. During the first two decades of the twentieth century this
essentially meant the newspapers. The first indication of a shift in
the stature of the dan came not on stage, but from the press, and
reflected a shift in the relationship with their patrons. These patrons,
mostly late-Qing/early-Republican literati/officials, had gone public
with their passion for their lover-boys by publishing their admiring
poetry and theater criticism in these new media. Their motive
appears to have been a new direction their patronage was taking
with the new social roles they were assuming. These were characterized by the new public spirit of the Republic, by their desire to
dominate and stake out the news media as their sphere of influence,
and finally by their desire to promote their own taste in the public
realm and demonstrate their influence by bringing national fame to
the lover-boys under their protection.
The first to articulate the connection between the young Republic
and the beauty and erotic power evoked by the dan was Yi Shunding
(1858-1920). Being one of the foremost poets of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and an active politician during the
1910s, his influence was considerable. From his poetry, which was
published in newspapers almost as a daily affair, we understand that
he was one of the most avid supporters of dan actors. His poetry
helped articulate in public the connection between the sexuallycharged dan actor and a national democratic desire, and challenged
the notion that the dan belonged exclusively to the private realm
of his patrons. This message signalled a new direction for patronage
culture: the dan shifted from being the rightful object of love for the
countrys elite to being an object for the public consumption of the
country. The country in turn was no longer represented by the
emperor and the political elite, but by the people. As the literati
shifted to assume a new persona, their ideal for patronage also
changed.
3
Wu Cuncun, Ming Qing shehui xingai fengqi [Erotic practices in Ming and Qing
society] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000), pp. 179-197.

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209

Among Yi Shundings poems, three stand out as documenting the

movement from private to public love (they were all written in the
style of the mid-Tang narrative long poem). The first is A song of
eternal lamentation: written for singer-boy Mei Lanfang (Wangu chou
qu: wei gelang Mei Lanfang zuo). The poem first declares that all the
heavenly efforts had been concentrated on making Mei the most
beautiful creature walking upon this earth; he is the condensation of
all the attributes of the legendary beauties from the past.4 It announces
in no uncertain terms the authors love for Mei, whose beauty and
singing make him unable to regain his peace of mind. His own feelings by extension must also be those of the public, which, like himself, must be aroused by the experience of the beauty and art of Mei
Lanfangs performance, an experience he believes is shared by all
men and women in the audience: At this moment [of seeing Mei
performing on stage] I am able to guess what people in the audience
in their hundreds and thousands are feelingall the men want to
marry Lanfang as their wife, and all the women want to be married
to him as his wife. Yi Shunding finds this reaction of the audience
completely natural. Mei Lanfang, this brilliant dan actor, is a rare
and beautiful thing, youwu, a term normally used for a woman of
rare beauty, and he possesses irresistible sexual allure. He has the
power to overcome all kinds of limitations within his person and is
able to make people think the unthinkable. Mei Lanfang is able to
transform a person completely.5
Yi Shundings second poem A song about Meis soul goes one
step further with this concept such a youwu cannot justifiably belong
to any private person but should be appreciated as something belonging to the public. As he put it, a dan actor like Mei Lanfang is a
public thing (gongwu) that belongs to All-under-heaven. It is as with
a flower, no one family can claim ownership. And he asks: Is it
not true that a treasure under heaven should be owned by All-underHeaven? He goes on to define the role of the patron as being akin
4
In other poems he talks about three dan actors as being heavenly beauties, naming Jia Biyun, Mei Lanfang and Zhu Youfen. See his Kuan shang ju shi (Kuans
[= Yi Shunting] poem of appreciating the Chrysanthemums [= actors]), in Zhang
Cixi, ed., Qingdai Yandu liyuan shiliao [Historical materials on Peking theaters [and
actors] in the Qing period] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1988), p. 761.
5
Yi Shunding, Wangu chou qu: wei gelang Mei Lanfang zuo [The song of
eternal lamentation: written for singer-boy Mei Lanfang], in Zhang, ed., Qingdai
Yandu liyuan shiliao, pp. 744-745.

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to that of a political representative representing the entire people

of the country, and having the task of transmitting [make known
to the public] the true picture of the soul and image of the dan, in
this case of Mei Lanfang. As a patron of this public treasure, his
poems of adoration for Mei are the representation of the psychology
of the entire people under Heaven from the past as well as from
today.6
On a formal level these poems might of course be regarded as a
form of jest. On a personal level, however, they convey a genuine
emotional response to both the personal beauty and the art of Mei
Lanfang. They express an acceptance of the new political reality,
which entails in some form, albeit enlightened, a transformation of
the way in which the privileged class operates. As it was written with
the intention of being published in the newspaper, the poem was to
evoke in the public mind the translation of the personal into the
political, offering both familiar and new ways of thinking about the
order of the world.
The central position of the public and the clear political reference
regarding the dan imply a connection between contemporary politics
and the new concept of patronage culture. They reflect first of all a
change in the understanding of the social position of the actor that
had been prompted by Western models. One of the first items in the
call to arms during the late nineteenth century political reform movement was to elevate the traditionally low social status of the actor to
that of a potential educator of the people. Theater, even better than
fiction, was able to transform the thinking of a whole nation. 7 Yis
poems also reflect the establishment of Chinas first parliamentary
political system based on the Western model, replacing imperial rule.
As a member of parliament, Yis interpretation of being the representative of the desire of people, although put here in a playful manner, clearly is influenced by his views and construction of what
belongs to the public; there is the notion of a redistribution of property which once had exclusively belonged to the elite class. Finally,
6

Yi Shunding, Mei hun ge [The song of Meis soul], p. 749.

For discussion on late-Qing theatre reform and the social position of actors, see
A Ying, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi [The history of late Qing fiction] (Beijing: Remin
wenxue chubanshe, 1980); Wan Qing wenxue congchao: Xiaoshuo xiqu yanjiu jua [A compendium of late-Qing literature: fiction and drama] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,
1960).
7

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211

since the collapse of the Qing court, which had been the arbiter of
taste in its patronage of the laosheng, the literati now occupied this
vacant center, and through the medium of the newspaper pushed
their cultural taste and preference in the public realm. The selfconfidence of the literati during these first years of the Republic was
very much dependent on their ability to be active in the public
sphere, and on the moral authority of their persona as being the
defenders of the public interest.
This move of patronage culture from the private to the public
realm implies that the new-style republican literati are now offering
the public what was once the symbol of their own class privilege.
They do this in exchange for an ever larger share of influence in the
emerging new society, and assign themselves the grand role of the
new cultural authority endowed with even greater power to dictate
and formulate public aesthetic taste.
In this spirit, Yi goes one step further and defines the dan as the
national flower (guohua).8 In his Song with Accompaniment on the
National Flower (Guohua xing), Yi offers a new conceptual horizon:
the power vested in the dan, in this case in Mei Lanfangs beauty/
eroticism, which has the capacity to transcend set boundaries and
built-in limitations and evoke passion on a national scale, makes him
the rightful candidate to be the flower of the Republic. The flower
thus stands for beauty, sexual allure, and the power to inspire love
and passion nationwide.
Through the choice of the dan as the national flower, men of
letters like Yi Shunding created one of the first original emblems for
the new Republic. The private callboy is now elevated to the position
of National Flower or that of the lover of the public and the
nation. The power of this symbol and star, Yi said, could infuse the
nation with new energy. At a time when the nation was lagging in
spirit, this flower could function as an inspiration.9
A flower of national significance, however, continuously needed
an admirer, a protector and a promoter. In this emblem the literati
had nicely carved out a role for themselves: as the representative of
the people, the duty of articulating admiration and securing protec-

Yi Shunding, Guohua xing [Poem on the National Flower], in Zhang, ed.,

Qingdai Yandu liyuan shiliao, p. 749.
9
Zhang, ed., Qingdai Yandu liyuan shiliao, p. 749.

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tion and promotion fell squarely on their shoulders. Much like the
traditional dan, the national flower is shown to be continuously
dependent on literati promotion.
Defining the Meaning of the National Flower: Femininity and Eroticism in
Cultural Renewal at a Time of International Martial Politics
As some of the leading literati of the capital redefined their own
relationship to the dan during the early years of the Republic, and
that of the dan to the nation, the nation itself was increasingly in a
crisis, threatened by fragmentation within and partition by foreign
powers from outside. Many members of the nations political elite
were calling for a strengthening of the male and martial spirit among
the Chinese as a precondition for strengthening the nation against
foreign aggression, and for strengthening society against ineffectual,
corrupt, tyrannical and unpatriotic state governments. Against this
background, the promotion of the dan to national stardom, to the
flower of the republic that represented a force of national inspiration, appears in startling contrast.
To begin to understand this contradiction, it might be helpful to
first examine why the laosheng or senior male role failed in this
competition. Laosheng actors such as Yang Xiaolou, who was comparable in ability and genius to Mei Lanfang, had in fact been
extremely popular with the common people. But when seen in the
context of national politicsand Peking opera and its actors were
inevitably part of that spacethe senior male figure quite naturally
evoked ironic associations and ended up being seen as a empty propaganda for the ineffectual warlord/politicians, if not outright as a
satire on them. Seen as a potential symbol set to rally the confidence
and the fighting spirit of the nation, the laosheng could only remind
people of the sorry state of affairs in reality. To use Yi Shundings
term, in the psychological makeup of the people during these unsettling times, this figure did not evoke confidence and self-assertiveness
in the nation. As the nation looked for psychological reaffirmation
and comfort, Peking opera became a national obsession, and with it
the rising dan. Instead of the strong-willed martial leader figure as
the national emblem that seemed both undesirable and not credible
for all segments of society, the dan gained new status and meaning
for the nation.

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213

There is no doubt about the power of press and the literatis promotion of the dan in this new public sphere. All the literati promotion
of the dan notwithstanding, the public, for its part, was under no
pressure to go along and do its part at the box office. But it did, and
this cries out for an explanation.
As an artistic figure, the dan fulfilled various functions. In the dan,
that is, a man intentionally and artfully impersonating a woman,
society appeared to have found its ideal outlet for a variety of conflicting feelings. He became a platform to express the new ideal for
the national state of China; the anxiety about its weakness; the fear
of its possible demise; the pride of its moral quality; the belief in its
cultural sophistication; and the hope of its capability of representing
Chinas cultural essence. In short, in the dan society not only defined
its anxiety regarding the present but also its hopes for the future.
The sexual appeal was there as well. In this state of physiological
uncertainty, at least for part of the audience the line between the
aesthetic and the sexual appeal blurred. When we look at the art of
the female impersonator preserved in photographs and film recordings, this appeal becomes nearly tangible. But even here, the sexual
appeal was not something inherited from traditional Peking opera.
In fact, the dan about whom early Republican audiences were so
crazy is a newly developed role, later known as the huashan. It was
created by merging three different types of dan: the flower dan
(huadan), or sexy female, who is strongly associated with salaciousness
and overt sexuality; the dark dress dan (qingyi), an upright female
of moral integrity; and the sword and horse dan (dao ma dan), the
martial female, who joins combat scenes in warlike outfits. Through
this merger, a new type was cast, and the patronage groups for the
young and upcoming dan actors wrote plays that suited this character
as well as the times. The result was a much fuller female persona
with a complex psychological profile and the capacity of being a
model of moral integrity, with a strong martial spirit, capable of
defending herself and, if need be, her country, while being at the
same time sexy, playful and lovable. All the major dan actors including Mei Lanfang became nationally known through acting in this
role. With this role, the dan was able to represent the image of the
ideal woman, and to stand for societys self-image: powerless in the
face of disorder, chaos and corrupt powers, she alone remains steadfast in her moral commitment, rallies her spirits through self-reliance,

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and through tenacious determination and cunning manoeuvres wins

the battles against evil; as the world falls apart all around her in these
operas, she becomes the only reliable and honourable, if female and
weak, force under heaven.
In the figure of the dan Chinese society appears to have found a
uniting emblem. As the dan almost never represents a person in
authority or power, it can be considered as a figure of lightness.
It is this lightness which help its establishes its authority without
seemingly challenging the status-quo or the existing power structure.
The dan almost never represents the figure of the state such as the
laosheng roles of the Emperor, the minister, the military general (this
changed later), or the scholar, but the subject of these authorities
and the state structure they dominate. In the figure of the dan, society
finds its self-image. In itself a problematique, a man impersonating
women becomes societys definition of its ideal female and of its self.
The rise of dan becomes part of a silent debate about the real stature
and gender posture of Chinese society and China altogether, a
debate that was carried out on many different levels of society and
within a wide range of political and emotional responses. One clear
example of this was the plethora of new dramas written exclusively
for the huadan role within the short period of one or two decades.
With them, a complex world of dramatic scenes of dilemmas and
struggles facing the female figure appeared on the public stage.
This new repertoire was written for their particular favourite by
literati supporters with the social position to support their favorite,
the literary skills to write such news operas, and the cultural sophistication to guide their dan to success. Until this moment, Peking
opera had very few great parts for the female impersonator. What
we know as Peking opera today, however, has little to do with the
pre-Republican tradition, and everything with this new input of creative writing, new staging and new performance styles. As these new
dramas were acted out on stage, the sense of anxiety and powerlessness in the general mood found convincing and triumphant embodiment in the female impersonator. We will return to this subject
later.
The artistic potential of the role of the dan has always been there.
But at a time when self-assured male imperial rule was dominating
the order of things in society, the dan had little chance to rise to
leading positions in the art. Of course, there had been famous dan

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actors in the past, Mei Lanfangs grandfather had been one of them.
He had even been the head of the Sixi opera troupe. But the actors
who were given considerable prestige and power by the court were
the laosheng, with Cheng Changgeng being the most famous. It took
the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the dissolution of the old order of
things, the introduction of Western notions regarding the possible
functions and the ensuing necessary social position of the theater, to
give the dan the chance to alter their long-held subordinate position
within the hierarchy of Peking opera.
The rise of the dan, however, was not a purely internal Chinese
affair. Like the enhancement of the social standing of the theater
altogether, the artistic direction the art of the dan took was in fact in
many respects a strongly international process. The image of the dan
was shaped by international taste. The power to arbitrate taste and
formulate aesthetic values even in China itself had shifted its center
during the early decades of the twentieth century, and had settled
beyond the boundaries of China; it was now in the Westwith
Japan as the most authoritative arbiter.
Shaping the Image of the Female Impersonator, Shaping the Image of
China?Japans Role in the Rise of the Dan
The rise of the dan was in large part the result of literati/politicians
of the young Republic demonstrating their power to reset public
taste, while fundamentally the choice was an expression of their
ambivalence and insecurity regarding their own position in the new
political order. In this they found allies in some of their Japanese
counterparts, although these pursued a different agenda. The first
case in point is the role played by the Japanese-owned newspaper
Shuntian shibao. On 22 September 1917, this paper launched an unusual event for a big daily, a competition among Peking opera singers.10 The event effectively staged the symbolic transfer of power
from the laosheng to the dan. There would be winners in three categories: the King of Opera World, Jujie dawang; the Best Singer
among Female Performers, Kunling diyi; and the Best Singer
10

The Shuntian shibao was founded in 1901 by Nakashima Saneo and Kamei
Michiyoshi. It was edited by Hirayama Takekiyo and published in Peking. It was
closed in 1930.

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among Boy Actors, Tongling diyi.11 By the end of the month two
candidates remained for the category of the King of the Opera
World: the laosheng Yang Xiaolou and the dan Mei Lanfang.
For the newspapers, reports on actors or the controversy between
the different dan factions was by the late 1910s not just a question
of news, they were part of their marketing. To create events around
top actors was one of the strategies used by newspapers to engage
their readers. By the late teens, in the middle of political upheavals
and the rise of warlords throughout Northern China, it appears that
the Shuntian shibao believed it was time not only to pay attention to
the dan, but to put him on the throne. This was a strange act. As
China was struggling with her sovereignty and identity, this newspaper
presented a female impersonator as the nations highest achievement
in the performing arts.
For the whole month of October, the paper was full of reports
and news about actors, theater performances past and present, and
the daily tally of the votes. During the last stretch of the competition
for the King of the Opera World, Mei had been trailing Yang, but
in a dramatic and not undisputed finish Mei moved into first place
during the last two days with an unbelievable 232,865 votes for him
cast on the last day alone. In the end a dan singer, Mei Lanfang,
then aged 24, had won the title of the King of Opera World. With
this event, the Shuntian shibao had created its sensation, and had also
made itself some enemies. For some, the thought of having a dan
actor represent the entire art of Peking opera was too shocking. 12
But for the paper, it was a great success, with the circulation steeply
rising during the last days of the competition and readers, who probably up to that time had never read an issue of the Shuntian shibao,
becoming interested. At the same time, the voters had had a chance
to express their most intimate feelings by voting for a man artfully
impersonating an upright and soft female.
11
Voting was to begin on October 2, and to end on October 31. The method of
voting was to buy a copy of the paper, cut out the printed vote card, fill in the
name of the voters choice, and send it to the office of the paper. The competition
was to coincide with the celebration of the publication of the 5,000th issue of the
paper.
12
For a study on this event see Yeh, From Male Flower to National Star: Choreographing Mei Lanfangs Rise to Stardom, in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christian
Horn, Sandra Umathum, Matthias Warstat, eds., Performativitt und Ereignis (Tbingen and Basel: A. Francke Publishers, 2003), pp. 259-276.

politics, art, and eroticism

217

This election of the King of Opera held by the Shuntian shibao

put the final touches on the undeniable rise of the dan to dominance
in Chinese public culture. In many ways Mei was the ideal candidate
for the post. His initial fame had been made in 1913 during his first
venture outside of Beijing as a guest performer in the star-making
city of Shanghai. He had taken the city by storm. While there, he
saw for the first time Shanghais innovative Peking opera on contemporary social themes in modern costumes. Back in Beijing, he
created and staged with the help of Qi Rushan (1875-1962)a dramatist who was to become his long-time collaboratormany new operas
that took on contemporary themes. The press focused its attention
on this young star with almost daily reports on his performances
during the season. His subsequent trips back to Shanghai helped to
consolidate his fame. At the same time, his international renown also
grew exponentially, with him being invited by the Foreign Ministry
in 1915 to perform for a visiting American teachers delegation. After
that, Mei was regularly invited by the government to perform for
foreign dignitaries. And to round off the picture, in the years between
1905 to 1918, before Mei Lanfang was invited to visit Japan, one of
his most ardent Japanese admirers was none other than kura Kihachir, the founder of Japans largest zaibatsu, or financial conglomerate, which had extensive interests in Korea and Manchuria.
The Japanese connection goes deeper. Some of Mei Lanfangs
most powerful supporters were Japanese-educated, among them Meis
lover, the head of the Bank of China, Feng Gengguang (Youwei,
1880-1966).13 As this group of new power-holders in the Republics
administration was concentrated in Beijing, their relationship with
and influence on a paper could be considerable.14 To elect a dan
actor, no matter how talented he might be, was a direct challenge
to the traditional order of things within the theatre world. The papers
decision to do so signals its belief that enough change had taken
place among Beijing audiences to make it likely that such an outcome
13
Feng was a graduate of the Japanese military academy; see Zhang Guogan,
Beiyang junfa de qiyuan [The origin and rise of the Beiyang warlords] in Beiyang
junfa ziliao xuanji [Selected sources on Beiyang warlords] (Zhongguo shehui kexue
chubanshe, 1981), vol. 1, p. 41.
14
There are many historical references to their decade-long love relationship.
Bao Tianxiao based a novel on their story, The Story of the Lingering Fragrance (Liu fang
ji, 1924). The relationship is also depicted by Zhang Henshui in his novel Private Records (Siren ji), first serialized in Shijie ribao between 1933-1935.

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would be accepted. At the same time, the paper was taking a high
risk. Its willingness as a foreign-owned paper to do so, to take the
lead in the making of public opinion by openly advocating a change
of hierarchy within Peking opera demonstrates much self-confidence,
if not arrogance. The vote seems not to have gone down well with
many Chinese theater-goers. Some openly declared that the vote
only demonstrated that Mei Lanfang was a Japanese King of the
Opera World and all this had nothing to do with Peking opera. 15
With this tainted association, Mei Lanfang never dared to use the
title; even the commercial presses found its use troublesome.
The Shuntian shibao election was neither the first nor the last sign
of Japans interest in matter of the dan. In 1919, Mei Lanfang received
and accepted his first invitation to go abroad from Japan. The invitation was extended to him by kura to perform at the most Western
and best-equipped theater in Tokyothe Imperial Theater, or
Teikoku Gekijwhere kura was head of the board of directors.16
Mei and his troupe arrived on April 25, and he gave his first performance on May 1, four days prior to the big opening rally of the
May Fourth movement in China. This was a student movement
protesting the handing over of the German colony in Shandong to
Japan in the Treaty of Versailles, a transfer that had been secretly
negotiated by the Powers. This movement quickly evolved into a
nation-wide boycott against Japanese goods. Hostile feelings against
Japan ran high in China as well as among the Chinese students
studying in Japan. In the midst of this turmoil and with many advising Mei Lanfang to cancel his visit, Mei Lanfang and with him,
Peking opera, made a first visit abroad.
While some work has been done on Mei Lanfangs later visit to
the United States, his visit to Japan has been very much neglected.
One of the reasons is certainly the question of timing. Meis visit
coincided with what was seen as one of the greatest humiliations in
modern Chinese history. An actor in the female role performing on
15
See Catherine Yeh, A Public Love affair or a Nasty Game?The Chinese
Tabloid Newspaper and the Rise of the Opera Singer as Star, European Journal of
Asian Studies, no. 3: 13-51.
16
It Nobuhiko, 1919-nen to 1924-nen no Bai Ranh raiNichi ken ni tsuite
[About Mei Lanfangs 1919 and 1924 performances in Japan] in Nakajima Satoshi
sensei koki kinen jigykai kinen ronsh hensh iinkai, ed., Nakajima Satoshi sensei koki
kinen ronsh [Essays for the Seventieth Birthday of Professor Nakajima Satoshi]
(Chfu: Nakajima Satoshi sensei koki kinen jigykai, 1981), pp. 669-698.

politics, art, and eroticism

219

the stage of a country that is in the process of humiliating his own

country seems to give the rise of the dan in this historical moment
an added twist. Under these conditions, his success became a questionable development.
What was Mei, for the Japanese as well as for himself, supposed
to represent? In every respect, Mei Lanfangs visit to Japan was an
international event. From the way his imminent arrival was built up
in the Japanese and Chinese press to the kinds of people who were
involved in inviting him and in shaping the program, Mei in fact
played the role of a cultural envoy. This involved, as is always the
case in such international events, diplomacy and image making. As
this was the first such cultural exchange, newspapers on both sides
were rather active in publishing news and commentary about it. As
the visit took place at such a sensitive historical juncture, the question
of the image of China inevitably formed the subtext both of Meis
visit and of his performance. There was a political burden on this
visit.
The event must also be seen in the context of Japans efforts at
nation building and their relationship to the theater. The problematic nature of Meis performing at this juncture in Japan was highlighted by the venue to which he was invited. The Teikoku Gekij
theater had been built to stage Western-type spoken drama and,
breaking with a ban of 300 years, there were women among the
actors. Both the Western-style architectural building and the presence of actresses were part of the efforts of the Japanese government
and the countrys elite to stage a Japan that modernized rapidly and
was worthy of respect. But what kind of image would Meis performancea Chinese man playing a womanevoke in the minds of a
Japanese audience in this politically charged theater? Especially if
one keeps in mind, as Ayako Kano has pointed out, that at this
moment in history the reputation and social position of the Japanese
female impersonators, the onnagata, in the kabuki theater was at an
all time low. They were seen as representing the uncivilized aspect
of Japans traditional culture.17
At the same time, the question can also be asked of Mei Lanfang
and Qi Rushan, the man who was the primary force behind the visit
17
Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Women in Modern Japan: Theatre, Gender, and Nationalism
(New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 19.

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and its artistic planning on the Chinese sidewhat kind of image

(or impression) they had wanted to create? What kind of image of
China were they to convey through the art of Peking opera?
Those who had invited Mei Lanfang and had worked hard to
make his visit a success and his art accessible to the Japanese audiences, men such as kura, might have wanted to create a positive
image of China through the art of Mei Lanfang, but they still had
to work within the cultural and political confines of Japanese society
of the time. One of their immediate concerns was Japanese public
opinion regarding China. Starting from about the Hundred Days
political reform around 1898 and up to the time of the Chinese
Republican revolution of 1911, an open debate raged in the Japanese
press concerning how strong China should be allowed to become
without hurting Japans interests.18 The representative power assigned
to the female as part of a Japanese national image-building agenda
from the Meiji period onward forms another important cultural and
political context against which Meis performance was received and
judged. As Ayako Kano has pointed out, around 1902 Japan represented itself in Europe as a modern nation by sending female actors
as members of government delegations. They were to symbolize
Japan as a modern country, replacing the onnagata, the backward
symbol of Japan.19 As an actor playing the role of the female impersonator, Meis performance could potentially represent for Japanese
audiences a re-calling of their own backward past that they felt they
had managed to leave behind.
What further complicates the image of the female impersonator
represented by Mei was Japans own reinvention as a modern nation.
To think of nations in gendered terms was part of Japans self-representation in the media (Figure 7.2). As Morris-Suzuki has pointed
out in her analysis of a 1910 cartoon celebrating the annexation of
Korea, Japan as male (represented by the first colonial GovernorGeneral Terauchi Masatake) rolls back the mythical rock door allowing the eternal light of Japan as female (represented by the sun
goddess Amaterasu mikami) to shine on the suitably diminutive

18
Urs Matthias Zachmann, Chinas role in the process of Japans cultural self-identification, 1895-1904 (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Heidelberg University. 2005), chapter 4, The Hundred Days Reform.
19
Ayako Kano, p. 25.

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221

Figure 7.2. Cartoon, Tokyo Puck, 1 September 1910; reprinted by Rykei Shoten,
Tokyo, 1996.

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Korean people.20 As the cartoon, itself like the title of the journal
clearly emulating foreign models, illustrates, the notion of the gendered nation was not unfamiliar to the Japanese public. It offers a
glimpse of the complexity of the cultural imagination of Japanese
society and the possible process by which the image of China or
more precisely the image of cultural China might be constructed
through Meis performances. One might say that subliminally it
involved the issue of Chinese national sovereignty. If China is not a
modern, muscular, nation but a man only able to play a woman,
does it deserve and can it be entrusted with running its own show?
With these issues and questions in mind, we will now turn to the
event itself in order to analyze what Mei Lanfang, Qi Rushan and
their Japanese hosts wanted the Japanese audiences to see, and what
these audiences in fact saw.
Preparations for Meis reception in Japan were done with meticulous care. The aim was to create public interest, formulate public
opinion, and build up momentum prior to Meis arrival. The strategy
on the part of Meis Japanese host in preparing Meis visit translated
into (1) creating the image of the dan actor as a star through the
publication of countless photographs of him in theatrical poses and
costume; (2) newspaper articles introducing him and Peking opera;
(3) translation and publication of the text and story-line of all the
program pieces Mei planned to perform in Japan; (4) massive advertisements; and, finally, (5) personal endorsement by well-known literati as well as mighty and powerful patrons in both countries.
(Figures 7.3 and 7.4). This was mainly carried out through various
publications. Among those published before Meis arrival, one stands
out through its representation of the conceptual framework in which
Mei Lanfang should be understood. Entitled Chinese Theater and Mei
Lanfang (Shinageki to Bai Lanh), the book contains: calligraphy dedicated to Mei by celebrity supporters to mark this historical occasionan indication of elite cultural standing; a great number of
photographs of Mei in stage costumeemphasizing the visual quality
of his art (Figures 7.5 and 7.6); a biography of Meiimplying social
status; a short history of Peking opera including the different stock
rolesconnoting respectability and cultural standing in China; an
20
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armont, NY:
Sharpe, 1998), illus. after p. 78.

Figure 7.3. Calligraphy dedicated to Mei Lanfang by Feng Gengguang (Youwei) on the occasion of the publication
of Murata Uks edited volume Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo: Genbunsha,
1919).

politics, art, and eroticism

223

Figure 7.4. Calligraphy dedicated to Mei Lanfang by kura Kihachir on the occasion of the publication
of Murata Uks edited volume Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo:
Genbunsha, 1919).

224
catherine vance yeh

politics, art, and eroticism

225

Figure 7.5. Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in The Drunken Beauty Guifei (Guifei
zui jiu); from Murata Uk, Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei Lanfang]
(Tokyo: Genbunsha, 1919).

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catherine vance yeh

Figure 7.6. Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in Rainbow Pass (Ni hong guan); from
Murata Uk, Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo:
Genbunsha, 1919).

politics, art, and eroticism

227

introduction to the props and musical instruments used in Peking

operashowing it as a well-developed art form; an introduction of
the female characters to be performed by Mei Lanfangfamiliarizing the audience with the type of character Mei was to embody;
theater reviews of Meis performances in Chinashaping the ways
to think about his performance; synopses of all the pieces to be
shownfamiliarizing the audience with the coming performances
and allowing them to focus on the art; legends surrounding Mei (the
beauty [Mei Lanfang] and the powerful men [around him], meishi
to kajin)rousing curiosity through gossipy anecdotes; texts of the
three famous pieces which had made Mei Lanfang famous and would
be performed: Daiyu buries the fallen petals (Daiyu sang hua),
Change flying to the moon (Change ben yue), and The Heavenly
Maid Showering Flowers (Tian n san hua) the signature pieces of
Mei which had gained him international renown through the reports
of foreign visitors to Beijing (Figure 7.7); and finally poems dedicated
to Mei by his Chinese literati admirers.21
Using this table of contents as a conceptual framework, we see
that in the vision of his Japanese supporters Mei Lanfang ideally was
to be presented as an actor steeped in Chinese traditional culture,
whose elegance and beauty represented the most brilliant achievement in Peking opera at the time, and whose fame in acting spread
far and wide was now to be witnessed in Japan. In this tailor-made
introduction of a Chinese dan actor to Japan, the stress was on Meis
links with traditional culture, with high society, and on his beauty
and art as a female impersonator. The obvious connection to the
onnagata actors in kabuki was not made.
When we look at the historical and cultural context, this construction forms the first step toward an international effort in shaping the
image of the dan. First, up to that time there was no history of
Peking opera; the history constructed in the book mentioned above
was a first. To have a history is to have a rightful place in the hierarchy of official culture.
Second, none of the pieces summarized in the later part of the
book represent the so-called traditional Peking opera; they all are
new pieces written in the 1910s by literati theater critics in Peking,
21
Murata Uk, Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo:
Genbunsha, 1919).

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Figure 7.7. Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in The Heavenly Maid Showering
Flowers (Tian n san hua); from Murata Uk, Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater
and Mei Lanfang] (Tokyo: Genbunsha, 1919).

politics, art, and eroticism

229

and most importantly by Qi Rushan, who wrote most of Meis new

operas.
Three, the link to high society both hides and highlights the homoerotic relationship Mei had with this circle; it is cast in terms of the
relationship between the grand courtesans of the past and their major
patrons. This is reflected in the poems dedicated to Mei. As these
are almost all written in the tradition of the talented scholar and
the famous beauty trope in which the writer assumes the persona
of the scholar and Mei that of the beauty, the reader finds him- or
herself on familiar ground. The message is a mixed one, representing
traditional culture, and the new obsession of the cultural elites in
both counties (as one Japanese newspaper commentator exclaimed,
Mei was is being lured to Japan as part of kuras designs to grab
him from his lover Feng Gengguang, the powerful chief of the Bank
of China, and that kuras desire for Mei were so great that his lust
makes his saliva hang three thousand feet. Miyako shinbun, 24 April
1919).
Fourth, much emphasis has been placed on Meis beauty and the
aesthestics of his acting. As a Japanese audience would not be able
to understand what Mei was singing, looks and acting became vital
points. With the increasing commercial pressures on traditional
culture that came with international interest, the dan representing
Peking opera in Japan had to forge a new path: to emphasize the
visual and the physical so as to overcome the difficulty of language
barriers. Going international involved a transformation of the art of
the dan.
What then was the Peking opera Mei Lanfang and his cultural
advisers wanted the Japanese to see, and what did the Japanese end
up seeing?
Meis visit was considered a success by all counts. But the final
program for his Japan tour was rather different from the one originally envisioned. According to Qi Rushan, who helped plan and
organize the tour, Meis visit to Japan should be seen mainly as
Peking opera going abroad and not simply as an affair concerning
only Mei Lanfang. Thus in the program as conceived by him, only
operas from the traditional repertoire were considered. From this
preparatory list we know that of the twenty-one pieces selected, only
five were new dramas. In the seven pieces of the actual program for
the Imperial Theater chosen and arranged by the Japan side with

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the scholar Fukuchi Nobuyo in charge, however, nearly halfthree

were newly written operas. In addition there was one piece from
Kunqu, or Kun opera, a form of opera that had been eclipsed by
Peking opera but was still loved and supported by the Chinese cultural
elite, and was familiar to educated Japanese.
The two programs represent two very different agendas. In the
case of the Chinese, the program reflects the feeling of an unstable
national identity where the Chinese organizer attempted to place the
emphasis on traditional cultural achievements as a way of deflecting
attention away from the actual low international standing of China.
By stressing Peking opera as representing traditional Chinese cultural
essence, the notion of China as a cultured nation was emphasized.
To a degree, the Japanese program went along with this. It went
even further in accentuating the split between the image of the politically weak China and a culturally strong and sophisticated Chinese
culture. Taking a cue from the political symbolism in the image
printed in Tokyo Puck, the two figures, male and female, interacting
there as martial male Japan and the female spirit of Japan merge
in Meis performance into the female impersonator. Unable to live
out a true manhood, he impersonates a woman, but the woman he
is impersonating is the eternal light of China, the moral strength
and cultured beauty of the Chinese nation. In this constellation, it
is not the modern state (as in the figure of Governor-General Terauchi)
who rolls back the mythical rock door to allow the eternal light to
shine forth, but Chinese cultural sophistication shines forth in spite
of, in contrast to, and through the weak state. Both are simultaneously represented in the actor Mei Lanfang and the female characters
he performs.
But the emphasis of the Japanese program was not on traditional
culture. The new operas chosen by the Japanese hosts placed great
emphasis on the new and modern female figure. In this way, the
program emphasized Chinas cultural revitalization, and through it,
its cultural modernization. It implied that it was possible for China
to have a weak and corrupt political elite, while at the same time a
resilient traditional culture was able to renovate and lead in spirit
the countrys modernization program. In this constellation, the male
playing the role of a female offers an acceptable and even positive
profile for China.

politics, art, and eroticism

231

This answers in part the obvious yet so far elusive question, why
the dan? The problem of Peking opera being represented by the dan,
who until recently had been largely confined to secondary and supporting roles, seems to have been eclipsed by the fact of Meis invitation to Japan. There never was an outcry in the Chinese or the
Japanese press. The shift was taken for granted. Why was this? This
lack of objections has to do with the fact that the roles Mei preformed
in Japan were not those traditionally associated with the dan, but he
impersonated with the huashan a new kind of female persona, a new
woman (xin nxing), though in a manner utterly different from the
New Woman of the May Fourth generation. Mei Lanfang was the
first to carve out the image of this new female. By the 1910s, new
pieces written for this type included The Heavenly Maid Showering
Flowers, Change flying to the moon, and Daiyu buries the fallen
petals. All of these had been chosen by the Japanese organizers for
their audiences.
What the Japanese audience did not see, however, is equally revealing. From the prepared program brought to Japan by Mei Lanfangs
group, the Japanese hosts eliminated all the martial pieces, including
signature pieces of Mei Lanfang, such as Mulan, the Disguised Warrior Maiden (Mulan congjun), and the rebellious female figures fighting
against oppression by despotic rulers, such as [The precious sword
named] Yuzhou feng (Yuzhou feng).22 (Figures 7.8 and 7.9) Without
exception, all the pieces chosen by the Japanese emphasized sensuality and beauty. The option in the Peking opera of having a martial
male on stage heroically confronting foreign invaders had been eliminated from the outset through the emphasis on the dan. The Japanese
selection also eliminated the option of a woman on stage fighting for
her country. The result seems to have offered a profile of China that
suited the mood of Japanese society at the time. Mei Lanfangs artful
beauties offered a stark contrast both to a violent China on the streets
of Beijing and the shamefully weak Chinese state.
To sum up, the program organized by Meis Japanese hosts highlighted in the role of the dan (1) aesthetic beauty through dance,
movement, and facial expression aided by fabulous costumes; (2) a
new type of well-rounded female persona in the huashan role with a
22
In contrast, both pieces were chosen by the Soviet authorities when Mei Lanfang visited the Soviet Union in 1935.

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catherine vance yeh

Figure 7.8. Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in Mulan, the Disguised Warrior Maiden
(Mulan congjun); from Murata Uk, Shinageki to Bai Ranh [Chinese theater and Mei
Lanfang] (Tokyo: Genbunsha, 1919).

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233

Figure 7.9. Photograph. Mei Lanfang performing in [The precious sword named]
Yuzhou feng (Yuzhou feng); from A. C. Scott, Mei Lan-Fang: The Life and Times of a
Peking Actor (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1959).

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catherine vance yeh

wide range of emotional expressions and psychological dimensions;

(3) a visually captivating beauty and physical grace that became part
of the art of the dan and enabled him to transmit in every gesture
and movement a subcutaneous eroticism and homoeroticism. The
genius of Mei Lanfangs acting was his ability to embody and evoke
this sense of eroticism without ever crossing the line of propriety.
The new huashan female persona was immensely comforting for
both the Chinese and Japanese public as well as for Mei Lanfang
and his supporters, and this especially at a time when the relationship
between the two countries was very tense. This was a character both
sides could live with. For the Japanese public an old culture made a
visit with renewed energy and beauty. In the dan, they saw the representation of a refined and sophisticated Chinese culture, which was
also remarkably modern and up-to-date. In cultural terms, this modernity brought a sense of renewal and cultural affinity with China. In
this new modernized dan, the Japanese found a sensuous female rather
than a threatening or posturing male opponent. In the art of a male
posing as a female, the possible confrontational posture was avoided.
The Tokyo public therefore could concentrate on and enjoy what
happened on stage, without the political situation getting in the
way.
Apparently, cultural sophistication versus state power was an
acceptable constellation in the Chinese public sphere. But was it an
apt formulation for Chinas relations with an aggressive Japan? In
the Chinese press, the general tone of comments and reports on
Meis trip was supportive and positive up to a point. This was regarded
as a historical eventPeking opera going abroad. The press saw Mei
Lanfang as representing the entire theater arts: this is an glorious
event for the world of Chinese theater.23 The focus was very much
on Mei Lanfang himself, but there was a clear idea that whether
intentionally or not, he would be seen as representing something that
had to do with China, Chinese culture, and Chineseness. Letters
were sent to the press to advise him what to do and what not to do
during his visit to Japan so as to create the best possible impression
and impact. A student studying in Japan went into great and knowledgeable detail with his advice, most of which in fact was eventually
23
Liaozi, Duiyu Mei Lanfang fu Riben de ganxiang [Thoughts on Mei Lanfang going to Japan], Chenbao (24 April 1919): 7.

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235

followed. It included a serious admonition: Dont spit, either on or

off stage.24 As China and its governing bodies appeared to be in a
state of fragmentation, the one thing which one could be proud of
was that Chinese culture was getting some international respect. As
one Chinese person wrote from Tokyo about his reaction to Meis
visit:
During the past years many Chinese high officials and noblemen have
come to visit Japan. But their visits all had an agenda; they all had some
kind of odious political smell about them. These visits therefore are not
only unwelcome to us, we also try our best to sabotage them being realized. Someone we would regard as the ideal visitor [from our home
country], to be welcomed by us, has to have the following three qualifications: (1) be a famous person, (2) have the ability to increase Chinas
prestige and pride internationally, and (3) to not be fooled by Japans
lies and false promises. As it stands, the grand officers and nobles are
indeed famous personalities, but was there one among them who did
not fall for Japans lies? Was there one among them who was able to
increase Chinas prestige and honor? It would already have been a miracle had they been able not to sell out our country. At this very moment,
just when I am so overcome with anger and helpless exasperation, all of
a sudden came [to Japan] Chinas Number One actor, Mei Lanfang.
This made me regain my spirits and write this letter.
The aim of Mei Lanfangs visit to Japan is, first, to introduce the artistic and cultural value of Chinese theater to a neighboring country,
and, second, to study Japanese theater to aid in [the further development of Chinese theater]. These are the very qualifications I mentioned
above.25

We see here a clear separation between the state, represented by

Chinese officials, and Mei Lanfang. The letter implies a separation
between the Chinese state and Chinese culture. Mei becomes a cultural envoy who is able to bring a pride and prestige to China, which
the official representatives of the country are unable to secure. The
potentially problematic representation of Chinese culture by a dan,
to whom occasional polemicists would refer simply as a transvestite
(renyao), is secondary in comparison to the level of Chinas political
humiliation at Versailles.

24

Liu dong yi xuesheng, Jinggao Mei Lanfang bin yiban yiyuan [Advice given
to Mei Lanfang and other actors with due respect], Shuntian shibao (27 February
1919): 3.
25
Konggu shanren, Meihua xiaoxi [News of Plum blossoms (= Mei the flower)), Chenbao, 4 May 1919.

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In this setting, Chinese culture going abroad with the female persona as its highest representative took on its own meaning. The
absence of criticism in the Chinese press signalled acceptance of this
visit. As an envoy of culture, the new female image represented by
Mei with her beauty, vitality, and moral fortitude qualified him more
and was more convincing than the politicians strong warrior pose,
which had lost credibility for many Chinese. In the image of a man
playing a woman to perfection, Chinese society seemed to have
found an accurate image of its own weakness and potential strength
at this time.
Conclusion: A New Gender Construct at a Time of National Crisis:
The Dan and the New National Symbol
The rise of the dan to the position of representing Chinese culture
on the international stage has to be seen against the background of
Chinas deplorable domestic situation and international standing. As
society pondered this fate under the condition of internal division
and international helplessness, it was remarkably open to new options
of thought and representation. The rise in the status of the dan
occurred at the very moment and could only happen when the state
was weakest and the traditional hierarchies, including gender hierarchies, were becoming less rigid and were under attack by reformers. It reflected the Chinese literati/politicians attempt to reconstruct
their manhood by establishing culture as the leading force in the
national reform efforts. By evoking the image of the male flower as
national icon, they projected their own new persona as the self-assigned patron and protector of the vulnerable young Republic. This
reconstruction of the identity of the literati/politicians was itself a
response to the larger international political scene. The theatrical
program taken to Japan that Qi Rushan helped organize, reflected
this larger concern. The rise of the dan was part of the Chinese
political and cultural scene, but it was also part of the international
politics of representation.
From this perspective, the ascendance the dan implicitly challenged
the status quo without insulting the pride of the nation. Mei Lanfangs
trip to Japan is the best proof, although it came at a most contested
moment, while protests against Japans policies were on the rise in

politics, art, and eroticism

237

China. With Mei, Chinese culture developed its own international

standing and international relations. Mei would even travel to the
Soviet Union and to the United States as an ambassador in his own
right.
The very act of transgendered impersonation and the eroticism
embedded in it gives the figure of the dan the necessary power to
transcend the boundaries defining men and women. It is precisely
this erotic element that offered itself for artful aesthetization. This
artful transgendered performance in turn heightened the embedded
eroticism and took away the potential social opprobrium. The essentialized femaleness in the art of the dan transcends femaleness itself
and becomes a recognizable sign crossing the limitations of gender,
class, and national boundaries. The eroticism evoked through the
dan is the translation of the particular beauty to that of the universal.
Thus the dan appears to have found acceptance at different levels of
society, across the political and cultural spectrum, and among both
men and women. He thus became the uncontested aestheticized erotic
symbol of the new Republic. Mei Lanfang became the Flower of
the Nation, there for all to love, appreciate, and be proud of.
There is, however, a potentially decadent interpretation of Meis
eroticism. The Japanese painter Kainosh Tadaoto (1894-1978) at
the time explored this imagined figure of China as the Oriental femme
fatale evoking through the turn of the body, the head and the eyes,
the sexual invitation of the man/woman (Figure 7.10).
The rise of the dan transformed Peking opera itself. While
looksas opposed to singing and actinghad never been a quality
in high regard in Peking opera, there is a clear shift towards the
visual during the early Republican period. This was aided by the
spread of photography. At the same time, new plays for a new type
of dan figure profoundly changed the very nature of Peking opera,
while maintaining the soothing notion that this was a truly Chinese
tradition able to survive in the modern world and find international
acclaim.
Yet, as the Japanese visit shows, audiences there did not simply
react to Mei Lanfangs beauty or art, but were shown a performance
that took care of their sensitivities and concerns. The invitation of a
female impersonator to represent Chinese cultureand through him,
the nationin Japan at a time when Japans ambitions in China
were more or less public knowledge, cries out for contextualization

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Figure 7.10. Kainosh Tadaoto, Mei Lan Fang, about 1924, color on silk, 40.8
33.3 cm; from Kyoto kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan, ed., Kainosh Tadaoto ten [Kainosh
Tadaoto Exhibition] (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1997), p. 43.

whatever the intentions of the people involved. As Mei came to Japan

as the representative of traditional Chinese culture, the image of
China being promoted in Japan appears to be that of a cultural
nation rather than that of a sovereign state. In the assessment of the
Japanese organizers, an image of China as a man superbly playing
a beautiful woman would be acceptable to Japanese audiences.

politics, art, and eroticism

239

The Chinese publics enthrallment with the dan actors can be read
as another, if implicit, dialogue with the political situation of the
country. It talks back to an official elite discourse set to promote a
male gendering of the Chinese nation and state as the proper path
to promote national strengthening. These efforts are visible at many
levels, from the promotion of a new, more martial national dress for
men by the first Republican government under Sun Yat-sen, to discussions about the goals of the school curriculum, from grand proposals and appeals to re-educate the citizens in martial spirit so as
to provide a basis for a strong international posture of the state, to
advertisements for pills for mothers to secure the birth of healthy
boys and the famous Pink Pills for Pale People. One might suggest
that the social preference for the upright dan figure indicates a sober
view about the usefulness of Chinese male posturing. At the same
time, Mei Lanfang himself was well aware of the limits his role of
the upright female imposed on his real-life persona. When Japan
actually occupied a part of China where Mei lived, he grew a beard
to make it politely impossible to perform for the invaders.

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gender, theater, and nationalism in modern japan

241

TWO ACTRESSES IN THREE ACTS:

GENDER, THEATER, AND NATIONALISM
IN MODERN JAPAN
Ayako Kano

1. Emergence of the Actress

This chapter examines the emergence of actresses in modern Japan
in the context of nation- and empire-building. Women had been
banned from performing in public in Japan since 1629, although a
number of women continued to perform privately.1 When the ban
was lifted in the Meiji period (1868-1912), the appearance of the first
generation of modern actresses coincided with a number of social,
cultural, and political changes, in the status of women in society, the
status of theater in the nation, and the status of Japan in the world:
womens lives were beginning to be ordered under the good wife,
wise mother ideology; theater was beginning to be regarded as cultural showcase as well as pedagogical institution for the modern
nation-state; and Japan was beginning to become a colonial and
imperial power, especially after winning the Sino-Japanese War of
1894-5, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.2
The rise to artistic and social prominence of actresses in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Japan signaled two seemingly contradictory moves at once: both a progressive step forward as women
entered into arenas previously reserved for men, and a problematic
strengthening of an essentialist definition of gender grounded in the
physical body rather than in performative achievement. This kind
of definition of gender constrained women into roles and behaviors

1
For a discussion of these female actors (onna yakusha) such as Ichikawa Kumehachi (ca. 1846-1913) who had been privately performing and teaching kabuki, see
Maki Isaka Morinaga, Women Onnagata in the Porous Labyrinth of Femininity,
U.S.-Japan Womens Journal 30-31 (2006): 105-131.
2
For a discussion of how definitions of literature and definitions of womanhood
intersected in modern Japan, see Tomi Suzukis article in this volume.

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that were seen as deriving from their biological nature, but also made
possible the kind of feminism that we know today.3
This kind of double-edged nature of the rise of the actress is also
observable in Chinese history, where women training as actresses in
the early twentieth century acquired a certain degree of freedom
outside their homes but also faced increasing exploitation and
alienation from the domestic realm.4 A similar situation existed in
Restoration period England, where the replacement of the boy actors
of the Renaissance theater by actresses simultaneously allowed
women a voice on the public stage and heightened voyeurism of the
female body.5
What makes the Japanese case a little more complicated than
those of seventeenth-century England and early twentieth-century
China is the fact that the introduction of actresses occurred as part
of the process of modern nation-building and empire-building, a
process in which Japan was emulating the West and also beginning
to impose its values on the rest of the East. Japan became an imperial power in the context of Western imperialism, and this process is
imbricated with the development of modern Japanese theater.
For example, one can see the process of formation of the Japanese
nation-state and the Japanese empire under the gaze of Western eyes,
as mirrored in the theater reform movement of early Meiji: The
Theater Reform Society (Engeki Kairykai), established in 1886
advanced several goals to showcase Japan to the West, including
eliminating what it saw as the old-fashioned and embarrassing practice of using male actors impersonating female roles (onnagata). One
could also say that the beginning of the modern Japanese theater
coincided with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, when the stylized portrayal of battle in the traditional kabuki theater was deemed
irrelevant, and the realism of actual fistfights and fireworks, brought

3
For a more detailed discussion, see Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern
Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
4
Weikun Cheng, The Use of Public Women: Commercialized Performance,
Nation-Building, and Actresses Strategies in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing,
Women & International Development Working Paper #275 (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2002). The quotes are from page 1. For further discussion of
modern theater in China, see Catherine Yehs article in this volume.
5
Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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243

to the stage by upstart modern theater troupes, was accepted as better representing modern warfare.6
The first professional actress in modern Japan is considered to be
Kawakami Sadayakko (1871-1946), a former geisha who started acting when she toured abroad with her husband Otojir (1864-1911).
She performed in orientalist pastiches with titles like The Geisha and
the Samurai when touring in Europe and the United States, but she
performed the role of a modernized and westernized woman once
she returned to Japan, and appeared in plays that orientalized Japans
Asian neighbors.7 She established the Imperial Actress School
(Teikoku joy yseijo) in 1908, which later became affiliated with
the Imperial Theater (Teikoku gekij) and trained the next generation of actresses such as Mori Ritsuko (1890-1961) in both traditional
and modern performance arts. The Kawakami troupe is considered
to be one of the originators of the new school (shinpa) genre.
Although it initially set itself in opposition to the old school or
kabuki, shinpa eventually came to be a kind of hybrid genre, focusing
on staging melodrama from the Meiji and Taish periods, and using
both actresses and onnagata.8
Matsui Sumako (1886-1919), on the other hand, was among the
first group of students to be trained in modern European-style theater (shingeki). She was a student of the Theater Institute (Engeki
kenkyjo) of the Literary Art Society (Bungei kykai) established by
Tsubouchi Shy (1859-1935) in 1909 as one of the first attempts to
school men and women in the techniques of shingeki. Sumako became
a star of the Literary Art Society and later formed her own troupe,
Art Theater (Geijutsuza) together with her lover and director Shimamura Hgetsu (1871-1918). Before her spectacular suicide in
1919, Matsui Sumako premiered plays with memorable female characters. Her Japanese premiere of Ibsens A Doll House in 1911 coincided with the founding of the feminist literary journal Blue Stockings
6
For further discussion of the connection between modern theater and imperialism, see Ayako Kano, Japanese Theater and Imperialism: Romance and Resistance, in U.S.-Japan Womens Journal, English version, no. 12 (1997): 17-47.
7
For a discussion of Japanese visual artists orientalizing Chinese women, see
Ikeda Shinobus article in this volume.
8
With the exception of actress Mizutani Yaeko, discussed later, shinpa continued
to be dominated by men. Yet many of the memorable roles performed in shinpa were
those of women, such as heroines of plays based on novels by Izumi Kyka
(1873-1939)

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(Seit), and thus actresses and the roles of new women performed
by them came to be identified with the beginnings of the feminist
movement in Japan.
The two actresses, Kawakami Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako,
can be seen as representing two different stages in the process in
which modern Japan, modern Japanese theater, and modern Japanese actresses were shaped simultaneously, and helped shape each
other. The rivalry between the two actresses, and the victory of Matsui Sumako over Kawakami Sadayakko, signifies the gradual taking
over of a new regime of gender and theatrical performance. In this
paper I will focus briefly on three instances of this rivalry. The first
instance is a well-known gem called Alt Heidelberg. Both Sadayakko
and Sumako performed this play, though under different titles, and
under very different circumstances. Their performances were, to my
knowledge, never directly compared with each other, but the contrast
is suggestive of the larger process transforming Japanese theater and
society. The second instance is the competing performances of Oscar
Wildes Salom. The third instance is of Maurice Maeterlincks Monna
Vanna.
2. Alt Heidelberg
Alt Heidelberg is a play by Wilhelm Meyer-Frster (1862-1934) and
has been turned into a musical and a film as well.9 The play shows
a prince from a small regional principality who is sent to Heidelberg
University to study, where he enjoys the local student culture and
promptly falls in love with a local waitress. Eventually the prince
must return home, in order to be crowned king and to marry a
princess, but he vows to remember forever his good old student days
in Alt Heidelberg.
The Kawakami troupe, headed by Sadayakkos husband, performed this play in 1910, under the title Korean King (Chsen ). This
was the year of Japans annexation of Korea, following the victories
in the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, and the play
9
The play is itself an adaptation of Meyer-Frsters novel Karl Heinrich, published
in 1899. In the United States the play is known through its adaptation as a musical,
titled The Student Prince, with music by Sigmund Romberg. It was also made into a
film, titled The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

gender, theater, and nationalism in modern japan

245

cleverly adapted the plot of Alt Heidelberg in order to present a timely

drama. In Sadayakkos version, a Korean prince is sent to Japan to
study at Kyoto University, and falls in love with a Japanese waitress.
The Japanese professor who teaches the young Korean prince studied
at Heidelberg University himself, so here we have a perfect picture
of the advanced Japan, having learned from the West, now teaching backward Korea.
This play, however, presented a problem for Japanese colonialism.
In brief, the romance between the Korean prince and the Japanese
waitress threatens to overturn the supposed hierarchy between the
colonizer and the colonized. For this reason, the play was heavily
censored, the romance was toned down, and emphasis was placed
on the education of the Korean prince by his Japanese mentors. The
very name of the play was changed from Korean King (Chsen ) to New
Nations King (Shin koku ), emphasizing that this was a universal story
about the education of a young nation by a more advanced
nation.10
Sadayakko played the role of the waitress, and her portrayal mirrors the oscillating roles she performed off stage as well: she starts
out in the play as a modern girl, dressed in Western clothes and
reciting a poem in English to welcome the Korean princes arrival.
However, in later acts, she becomes more subdued, changes into a
kimono and adopts the conventions of a geisha quietly longing for a
man who will eventually leave her. In other words, in the first half
of the play she capitalizes on the westernized image she cultivated
in the Japanese press, but in the end, she falls back into the role of
the geisha, the abjected other of both actresses and of the good
wife and wise mother. The geisha was also a role valorized by shinpa,
and a photo of the Kawakami troupes production of the play shows
the heroine (acted here by Kawakami Otorjirs niece Kawakami
Sumiko) dressed in kimono, leaning against the pillar of the Japanesestyle house, gazing wistfully at the prince seated in a chair (Figure
8.1).
Matsui Sumako performed the same role a few years later in 1913:
under the title Remembrances (Omoide), she performed, not in an adap-

10

The play has not been published, and is located in manuscript form in the
Kawakami Archives at Waseda Universitys Tsubouchi Memorial Theater Museum.

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ayako kano

Figure 8.1. The Kawakami troupe in Alt Heidelberg a.k.a. New Nations King from Engei
gah (November 1910). Shizuma Kojir as the prince, Kawakami Otojir as the
professor, Kawakami Sumiko (Otojirs niece) as the waitress.

tation but in a straight translation of the play.11 This time, there was
little if any interest from the government censors, and the critical
consensus on the play was that it was a sentimental melodrama, not
really worthy of the attention of the modern theater, but staged for
the sake of easy financial gain. Far from being seen as politically
dangerous, it was seen as too innocuous.
The playwright Akita Ujaku was particularly trenchant, attacking
the fact that neither the hero nor the heroine seems at all self-conscious or critical about their respective social environments and the
class difference that separates them. The prince kisses the waitress
because he has been released from the confines of the court and now
lusts after women; she loves him because she is flattered that a prince
would pay attention to her. The kind of sentimentalism expressed
in this play has not even reached the level of self-awareness of
romance found in conventional kabuki plays Akita scoffed.12 The
11

She later reprised the role 31 December 1916 to 10 January 1917.

Akita Ujaku, Tsubouchi hakase no tame ni kanashimu: Aruto Haideruberuhi ni tsuki [Feeling sad for Dr. Tsubouchi: On Alt Heidelberg], Engei gah (March
1913): 151-161. The quote is from page 156.
12

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247

critic Kiyomi Rokur, who agreed that this was indeed a sentimental
play of little literary merit, nonetheless praised Matsui Sumakos
portrayal of the heroine. Sentimentalism is shared more deeply by
women than by men. Even for Sumako, this is the case. That is
probably why the scene of parting, where she breaks down crying
and is barely able to speak, expressed a true sense of pathos that we
could certainly not see in female roles when performed by men.
Sumako was famous for performing the roles of strong and liberated
women, but the critic noted that even when portraying a conventional feminine woman, Sumako is indeed quite skillful.13
In the photographs we have of her performance, Sumako was
dressed in a Western outfit, with her arms exposed, often raised high
to carry multiple steins of beer (Figure 8.2). Throughout her career,
Sumako would be praised for the physical sensuality of her presence
on stage, and this play seems to have been no exception.
What we see in the change from one to the other is a process of
the formation of modern theater and modern gender: from a freewheeling adaptation to a straight translation that values the original;14
from a play that thematizes Japans emerging and ambivalent role
as an imperial power to a play that takes it for granted that Japanese
actors can embody German characters; from a play in which romance
is downplayed because it threatens the colonial hierarchy to one in
which romance is so central that it is derided because of it; 15 from a
performance in which the Japanese woman acts like a geisha to one
13
Kiyomi Rokur, Omoide o mite [On seeing Remembrances], Engei gah (March
1913): 126-132. The quotes are from page 132).
14
Valuing the original in the form of a straight translation is a new idea, preceded by free-wheeling adaptation in the tradition of mitate of the Edo period. For a
discussion of Meiji era adaptations, see J. Scott Miller, Adaptations of Western Literature
in Meiji Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
15
Romance, of course, is a tricky term. My argument here is that romance in
Korean King/New Nations King threatens the colonial hierarchy, but it is also true that
Kawakami Otojir wanted to create a homosocial theater that minimized heterosexual romance. Heterosexual romance in that sense would be associated with the
old kabuki theater as well as with Western theater, both of which he was trying to
repudiate in his quest to create a Japanese straight theater. See Acting Like a Woman
in Modern Japan, 57-84. In Sumakos case, romance is accepted as central to the shingeki, more explicitly modeled on European theater. Here, romance as an expression
of personal freedom is contrasted with opposing forces such as family and social
norms. The critics of Alt Heidelberg have the kind of ideal play in mind that would
portray the romance between the prince and the waitress as a declaration of freedom
from the constraints of social class.

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ayako kano

Figure 8.2. Matsui Sumako in Alt Heidelberg a.k.a. Remembrances from Peony Brush,
between pp. 88-89.

in which she acts like a German waitress, and in which she is perversely praised for being able to play such a feminine role.
3. Salom
In later years, the rivalry between the older Sadayakko and the
younger Sumako became more explicit. Salom provides the best
example. The play by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was first introduced
to Japan in 1907, and eventually became extremely popular on stage.
It was presented to the public by various actresses in no fewer than
twenty-seven separate productions between the premiere in 1913

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249

and the end of the Taish era a dozen years later.16 The 1914 Salom
performance by the two actresses marks a moment in Japanese history when the alignment between gender, sex, sexuality, and performance registered a recognizable shift.
One of the most significant scenes in Salom is the dance scene in
which the heroine, a typical femme fatale, performs what amounts
to a striptease, pulling off layers of veils one by one, in order to
seduce her father-in-law and get him to give her the head of John
the Baptist, or Jokanaan in the play.17 Because of the nature of this
scene, Salom is a play that would be difficult indeed for an onnagata,
the traditional male actor impersonating female roles in kabuki, to
perform. The whole point of the play, it seems, is to strip down the
woman to her bare essence, or as close to it as the censors allow.18
Therefore, we could say that the title role of Salom epitomized the
new definition of womanhood as rooted in the physical body. It was
in performing Salom that Matsui Sumako decisively triumphed over
Kawakami Sadayakko, and signaled the beginning of a new era for
women and performance in Japan.
Comparing the two performances, critic Osanai Kaoru wrote that
Kawakami Sadayakkos Salom revealed her age: her flesh was
too desiccated; her blood was too dry, lacking the all-important
element of sensuality. In contrast, Matsui Sumakos Salom was
quite voluptuous in body, though rather superficial and impoverished
in spirit.19 Kawakami Sadayakkos dancing was criticized by Osanai
Kaoru as looking too Japanese, due to her training in Japanese dance
and the lack of heft to her hips. This is another indication that kabukistyle gestures could not convey the overt sensuality required for the
role. Matsui Sumakos dance, on the other hand, was choreographed
by Giovanni Vittorio Rosi, an Italian director, and emphasized her
well-endowed body. Honma Hisao praised her extremely able portrayal of the egoistic, aggressive, and selfish aspects of the woman

16
Imura Kimie, Sarome no heny: honyaku, butai [Saloms transformations: Translations and performances] (Tokyo: Shinshokan, 1990).
17
For a discussion of the femme fatale in Taish painting, see Doris Croissants
chapter in this volume.
18
For a discussion of the nude in the paintings and posters of modern Japan, see
Jaqueline Berndts chapter in this volume.
19
Osanai Kaoru, Hongza no Sarome [Honogza theaters Salom], Engei
gah (June 1915): 148-163. The quotes are from page 155 and 150 respectively.

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called Salom,20 and concluded that Sumakos Salom dominated

all others.21
Photographs and drawings of the two performances suggest that
this contrast was also present in the costumes. A photograph of
Kawakami Sadayakkos performance shows the actress in a longsleeved dress of heavy brocade, which Osanai aptly described as a
peculiar Elizabethan robe of silver, covering her body from neck to
toe. Osanai complained that so much of her body was covered in
cloth that she looked like a bandaged patient. He objected in particular to the covering of the feet: he reminded the reader that in
the stage design by Charles Ricketts, the floor was black so that
Saloms white bare feet would stand out. Covering Saloms bare
feet constituted a grave insult to the play (Figure 8.3). This stage
photograph of Kawakami Sadayakkos performance is interesting
also because it places the woman in a subservient position vis--vis
the man: Jokanaan, portrayed by Inoue Masao, has emerged from
the well, and stands rigid in the upper right corner of the picture.
His arms are crossed in defiance, his face turned directly to the audience. Kawakami Sadayakkos Salom, on the other hand, is situated
in the lower left, her body and face turned upward at Jokanaan, arms
raised as if in supplication or fear: not a very threatening figure.
In comparison, Matsui Sumakos costume as seen in several photographs revealed both of her arms up to the shoulders, as well as
her bare feet. The dress was fastened at one shoulder in toga-fashion,
and during the dance scene it would come off to reveal most of her
torso (Figure 8.4). In one photograph, she gazes up at the erect figure
of Jokanaan, in a pose similar to that of Kawakami Sadayakko, but
one might notice that in the case of Matsui Sumako there is less
vertical distance between the man and the woman.
Mizutani Yaeko, an actress of the generation following Matsui
Sumako, summarizes the meaning of this role for actresses: The
most important scene in Salom is the place where she strips one veil
after the other to show off the beauty of her body. Although my body
is not that attractive, I performed this scene, thinking of it as being

20
Honma Hisao, Sendai Hagi to Sarome [Sendai Hagi and Salom], Engei gah
(January 1914): 50-54. The quote is from page 53.
21
Honma Hisao, quoted in zasa Yoshio, Nihon gendai engeki shi [History of contemporary Japanese theater] (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1985) 1: 144.

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Figure 8.3. Kawakami Sadayakko in Salom, with Inoue Masao as Jokanaan, courtesy
of Waseda Universitys Tsubouchi Shy Memorial Theater Museum.

part of my training.22 The display of the body became the testing

and training ground for actresses in the years following Sumakos
22
Quoted in Imura, pp. 146-147. Mizutani Yaeko (1905-1979) was probably the
most important actress of the generation following Kawakami Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako. She was a performer in both in shinpa and shingeki, and also made appearances in film. Her acting combined the shingeki actors analytical understanding
of scripts with a shinpa actors glamorous stylization appealing to broad audiences.
She made her debut in the inaugural performance of the Geijutsuza theater led by
Matsui Sumakos and Shimamura Hgetsu in 1913, and later became the signature
star, touring widely until it disbanded in 1945 due to the war. She also appeared in
shinpa productions and contributed to the genres revival of the late 1920s. She joined
onnagata Hanayagi Shtaro (1894-1965) in his shinpa troupe in 1949, and after
Hanayagis death, was considered the most important shinpa performer, though even
her immense popularity could not stem the genres postwar decline. Her daughter
Yoshie (1939-) inherited the name Mizutani Yaeko in 1995, a procedure common in
kabuki but unprecedented in shinpa or shingeki.

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Figure 8.4. Matsui Sumako in Salom, with Kat Seiichi as Jokanaan, courtesy of
Waseda Universitys Tsubouchi Shy Memorial Theater Museum.

performance of Salom. It was by showing their bodies that women

proved they were better in performing the role of women than onnagata. The display of the female body, however, did not signal an
uncomplicated triumph for women. Salom became the pretext for
striptease: by the late 1920s, geisha in Tokyo had developed a routine
in which they would take off seven layers of kimono sashes, while
singing Give me Jokanaans head.23
The role of Salom, with the dance of the veils reducing the
actress to the bare and visible essentials, epitomized the new definition of womanhood as rooted in the physical body. In the larger
context of modern Japanese theater, eventually the arguments in
favor of actresses won over those against actresses, yet the victory
was an ambivalent one, because it confirmed the definition of wom23

Imura, p. 96.

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253

Figure 8.5. Shkyokusai Tenkatsu in Salom, courtesy of Waseda Universitys Tsubouchi Shy Memorial Theater Museum.

anhood as an essence naturally grounded in a womans body, a definition which would also justify the reduction of woman to nothing
but her body.24
This paradox is exemplified by a photo that shows the magician
Shkyokusai Tenkatsu (1886-1944) in a performance of Salom in
1915, and that seems to capture the difficulty that women on stage
faced (Figure 8.5).25 The same logic that allowed women to perform,
the same logic that enabled them to prove that they were better than
the onnagata, also worked as a logic that forced them to reveal their
bodies in this kind of way. This point, however is also exemplified
by another picture, which takes us to the third and last instance of
rivalry between the two actresses that I would like to discuss.

24

For a fuller discussion of the performance of Salom, see Ayako Kano, Visuality and Gender in Modern Japanese Theater: Looking at Salome, in Japan Forum,
special issue on modern Japanese visual culture, vol. 11, no. 1 (1999): 43-55.
25
This is the photo that was initially chosen by my publishers for use on the
cover of Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan.

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4. Monna Vanna

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) published Monna Vanna in 1902; it

premiered in Japan in 1906, with the title role performed by Kawakami
Sadayakko; it was also performed by Matsui Sumako in 1913. The
plot of Monna Vanna is exquisitely melodramatic. The time is the end
of the 15th century; Monna Vanna is the wife of Guido, a nobleman
of the Italian city of Pisa. Pisa is under siege, and General Prinzivalle
who is leading the siege and threatening to starve the Pisan citizens,
turns out to be a long-time admirer of Monna Vanna. By the end
of the play, he has won the heart of Monna Vanna, and she agrees
to flee with him. Thus, the plot is that of a love triangle: Monna
Vanna, her husband Guido, and her admirer General Prinzivalle.
There is not much in the press regarding the performance of Monna
Vanna by Kawakami Sadayakko. A couple of newspaper items from
1906 merely mention that this play was to be performed by the
Kawakami troupe following the original, and as a straight theater
(seigeki), taking place in its original setting of fifteenth-century Italy,
rather than adapted into a Japanese setting.26 This was a rarity at
the time, and hence received special mention. Matsui Sumakos performance in 1913, on the other hand, was her first as the star actress
of the newly formed Geijutsuza troupe, and thus received considerable attention. Many in the audience seem to have identified Monna
Vanna with the actress herself and Prinzivalle with her lover Shimamura Hgetsu, the man with whom she had founded the new
troupe.27
We should note, however, that this analogy of Monna Vanna as
Sumako and Prinzivalle with Hgetsu was not a stable one. In a
fictional dialogue, published in 1915, a male voice sympathetic to
Sumako and a male voice critical of her engage in a discussion of
the relationship of Sumako and her lover. At one point, one of the
men suggests an analogy with the plot of Monna Vanna. One might
expect that Sumako would be Monna Vanna, and Hgetsu would
26
Miyako shinbun 5 October 1906; Yomiuri shinbun, 9 February 1906; rpt. in Shirakawa Nobuo, ed. Kawakami Otojir, Sadayakko: shinbun ni miru jinbutsu z [Kawakami
Otoji, Sadayakko: Their personalities as seen in newspapers] (Tokyo: Yshd,
1985) 440 and 441 respectively.
27
Sadoya Shigenobu, Hgetsu Shimamura Takitar ron [A Study of Shimamura
Hgetsu] (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1980), pp. 436-438.

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255

be Prinzivalle, but the other man gives us the correct interpretation:

You mean, Mr. Hgetsu as Monna Vanna, Mrs. Hgetsu as Guido,
and Sumako as Princivalle, right?28 In this extraordinary genderbending analogy, the male Hgetsu becomes the heroine of a love
triangle, deserting his female husband and running off into the arms
of the male Sumako. This kind of shifting the agency away from
Sumako to Hgetsu, from the actress to the male director, was typical
of the period.29
In this photograph of Matsui Sumako as Monna Vanna, the actress
is wearing a cape, or cloak, or mantle, called manto in Japanese,
from the French manteau (Figure 8.6). The manto was introduced
to Japan in early Meiji as a coat to be worn in the cold months, and
reached its peak of fashion in 1911, the same year as Matsui Sumakos
debut as an actress in Henrik Ibsens A Doll House, and the year of
the founding of the feminist journal Blue Stockings, i.e. the year many
regard as the beginning of feminism in Japan. The manto is worn by
Nora as she leaves her house at the end of A Doll House, and is thus
part of the outfit that symbolizes the new woman who is leaving
her family in order to find herself (Figure 8.7). The manto is also worn
by the opera singer Magda, the heroine of Gerhart Hauptmanns
play Heimat, as she leaves her home and her homeland (Figure
8.8).
The significance of the manto, then, is that it is a signal of modernity
and womens freedom, but not in the form of casting away layers of
clothing and revealing the body, as in the case of Salom, but rather
in the form of a new type of clothing that both covers the body and
grants it freedom of movement. The manto is, above all, what a new
woman wears to go outside the home. This is perfectly illustrated
by a haiku presumably written by Matsui Sumako and published in
her memoir, along with a photograph of her wearing a manto (Figure
8.9):
Manto kite ware atarashiki onna kana.
(Wearing a manteau, I am a new woman)

The manto is part of the costume for Monna Vanna, and has a crucial dramaturgical function in the play, as follows: General Prin-

28
29

Haino Shhei, Sumako ni kansuru taiwa, Engei gah (June 1915): 28-32.
See Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan, pp. 128-135.

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Figure 8.6. Matsui Sumako in Monna Vanna from Peony Brush, between pp. 128-129.

Figure 8.7. Matsui Sumako in A Doll House from Engei gah (October 1911). Matsui
Sumako as Nora, Doi Shunsho as her husband Helmer. In the insert on the upper
right, she is dressed in a manteau, ready to leave the house.

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257

Figure 8.8. Matsui Sumako as Magda in Heimat, dressed in manteau from Peony Brush,
between pp. 34-35.

zivalle makes an indecent proposal to Guido. He will send food into

the city under siege, if Guido sends his wife Monna Vanna to come
to Prinzivalles tent at night, dressed only in manto with nothing
underneath. Of course the husband assumes, along with the audience, that Prinzivalles intention is to take sexual advantage of Monna
Vanna. However, it turns out that Prinzivalles real purpose is to
find out whether Monna Vanna is able to transcend the realm of
the physical and to share the spiritual love that he has felt for her.
Thus while the manto is a sign of physical degradation in the eyes
of the husband, in the eyes of the lover it is a sign of spiritual love.
And for the heroine Monna Vanna, the significance of the garment
shifts from one to the other, from a sign of humiliation to a sign of
triumph, as she decides that her husband is the one that is trapped
in social circumstances, and that she would rather run off with the
lover. But for the audience, who knows that Monna Vanna is sup-

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Figure 8.9. Matsui Sumako as a new woman dressed in manteau from Peony Brush
between pp. 224-225.

posedly naked underneath, the manto clearly serves to suggest the

physical body, regardless of Prinzivalles insistence on the spiritual
and non-physical dimension of his love.
The final aspect of the photo that needs to be discussed is a smudge
on the shoulder of the actress. It is a wound from bullets that fly by
Monna Vanna on the way to Prinzivalles tent inside the enemy
camp. Monna Vanna pulls at the collar of the manto to show off this
wound twice in the play. The first time is when she shows it to Prinzivalle, immediately after arriving at his tent. It is a titillating moment,
because the audience, along with Monna Vanna, expects that at the
next moment she will have to cast off her manto and submit to villainous Prinzivalles base desires. But it turns out that this is as much
flesh as the audience will get to see, since Prinzivalle is really in love

gender, theater, and nationalism in modern japan

259

with the soul of Monna Vanna, not her body, and they will spend
the night exchanging poetic passages back and forth.
The second time she shows the wound, however, is more complicated. For various reasons, Monna Vanna ends up telling her husband
everything that has happened, and he becomes incensed. Prinzivalle
is captured, and is about to be put to death. Monna Vanna realizes
that there is only one way to save her lover: She tells her husband
that she was lying before, that Prinzivalle did try to rape her, that
they fought all night, and that this wound is the evidence of her
resistance. With this as her reason, she is able to convince her husband that she alone should be the one to torture Prinzivalle; she thus
obtains the key to the dungeon, and thus she and Prinzivalle are able
escape together.
So the wound signifies in the first instance the dangers surrounding
Monna Vanna and her vulnerability, and in the second instance,
that vulnerability is turned around into a weapon to achieve her
desired goal. In this sense, too, the photo crystallizes the double-edged
nature of the rise of actresses: it is Monna Vannas victory and her
vulnerability, as well as the victory and the vulnerability of actresses
in general, that could be said to be symbolized in this
photograph.30
The years following the rivalry of Kawakami Sadayakko and Matsui
Sumako saw women take on a variety of roles on stage and off. The
all-female Takarazuka theatre was founded in 1913 by entrepreneur
Kobayashi Ichiz (1873-1957) to attract families to his hot-spring
resort, and had become by the 1930s a full-fledged troupe known
for French-style revues.31 The 1920s and 1930s in Japan saw other
30

This is why I chose this photograph to be on the cover of Acting Like a Woman in
Modern Japan.
31
It seems, from the evidence Jennifer Robertson presents, that Takarazuka as
we know it today was shaped in the 1930s, rather than in the decades immediately
following its founding in 1913. The 1930s were when the content of the shows
changed from childrens stories and folktales to musical dramas and revues; when
the word girl (shjo) was dropped from the troupe name to signify this shift to more
adult-oriented entertainment; when the first official fan club was created; and when
sexologists blamed the female impersonator of male roles (otokoyaku) for provoking
the increased incidence of lesbian practices. One might argue then that while the
1930s could be said to be characterized by androgynous ambivalence, the earlier
decades of the twentieth century were characterized more by an establishing and
policing of a strict gender dichotomy. Such a dichotomy was manifested sometimes
by anxiety over androgyny, but equally often by expressions strongly grounded in a

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venues emerge, like Casino Folies (1929) and Moulin Rouge (1931),
capitalizing on the sexual appeal of the modern girl.32 Meanwhile,
serious actresses, especially those in shingeki troupes, worked diligently
to establish their professional credentials: Tamura Akiko (1905-1983),
Yamamoto Yasue (1906-1993), and Sugimura Haruko (1909-1997)
were among them. While some actresses distinguished themselves in
proletarian theater, Okada Yoshiko (1902-1992) created a sensation
in 1938 by emigrating with a lover to Soviet Russia. Many actresses
also began appearing in cinema and television. After World War II,
a new generation of remarkable stage actresses like Shiraishi Kayoko
(1941-) and Ri Reisen (1942-) emerged from the underground and
small theater movements in the 1960s and 1970s, although charismatic, even authoritarian, male directors dominated the genre. The
portrayal of women during this time tended to focus on the darker
side, such as sexually exploited women and mad women. The 1980s
and 1990s saw the emergence of many female playwrights like Kisaragi Koharu (1956-2000), Kishida Rio (1950-2003), and Nagai Ai
(1951-), and the staging of female characters created by female playwrights and female performers was no longer an extraordinary occurrence. Some women like Kisaragi and Watanabe Eriko (1955-) led
their own theater troupes, and reflecting the rise in awareness about
womens issues in theater, the first Conference for Asian Women
and Theater was held in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1992.
But in the first decades of the twentieth century, all of this was
yet to take place. Acting like a woman in the context of modernizing
Japan and its theater meant several contradictory things at once. It
meant entering a sphere of activity previously dominated by men
and thus widening the scope of acceptable behavior for women, but
it also meant becoming part of a discourse that defined femininity
as something grounded in the physical body. It meant the possibility
of acting out roles that embodied feminist ideals, but it also meant
having to accept the risk of being objectified and sexually exploited.
It meant being at the vanguard of introducing Western dramas and
discourse of naturalized and biologized gender. See Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka:
Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998). See also my review in Journal of Japanese Studies vol. 25 no. 2 (1999): 473478.
32
For a discussion of the Modern Girl in China during the same period, see
Tze-lan Sangs chapter in this volume.

gender, theater, and nationalism in modern japan

261

their potentially liberating influences, but it also meant performing

a part in modern theaters representation and reproduction of nationalist and imperialist ambitions. The rivalry between Kawakami
Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako exemplifies these contradictions, and
elucidates the intertwining of nationalism, theatrical reform, and the
modern formation of gender.

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gender play in modern japanese painting

part four
ART, SEXUALITY, AND NATIONAL EROTICS

263

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gender play in modern japanese painting

265

FROM MADONNA TO FEMME FATALE:

GENDER PLAY IN JAPANESE
NATIONAL PAINTING
Doris Croissant

A major concern of Meiji cultural reforms was the restructuring of

visual arts into a tool for national image building. After enthusiastic
attempts at importing Western art education, the success of Japanese
export-ware on the world market stimulated a reverse course of
native art promotion. As a remedy for the threat of Westernization,
the conception of New Japanese Painting (Shin-Nihonga) evolved during the 1880s under the guidance of the American philosopher Ernest
F. Fenollosa (1858-1908), and was made into an academic discipline
by his disciple, Okakura Kakuz (1863-1913), director of the Tokyo
Art Academy between 1889 and 1898.1 While Fenollosa prophesized
thatcontrary to the hopes of supporters of Western-style painting
(yga)only the synthesis of Asian and Western painting would push
Japan to the forefront of world art, Okakura elaborated the principles that burdened Nihonga artists with the task of re-investing conventional techniques and motifs with the spirit of the times.
One of the most pressing tasks for national representation consisted in the severance of the female image from the floating world
of Edo popular culture. The long-standing affiliation of female beauty
with the courtesancelebrated into the 1890s as the epitome of
refined sensuality, everyday elegance, and erotic charmcontrasted
sharply with the ideal Meiji woman who was supposed to embody
the womanly and motherly virtues thought essential to the good
wife and wise mother (rysai kenbo) doctrine.2 In the early Meiji era,

1
Ellen P. Conant, ed., Nihonga. Transcending the Past: Japanese-Style Painting, 18681968 (St. Louis: The St. Louis Art Museum 1995); Victoria Weston, Japanese Painting
and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and his Circle, (Ann Arbor: The Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2004).
2
Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, The Meiji States Policy Toward
Women, 1890-1945, in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 16001945 (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1991), pp. 151-174

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the quest for historic exemplars of respectable women that could

serve as symbols of nationhood posed serious problems.3 Yet, around
the turn of the century, the ukiyo-e courtesan, who was celebrated as
the epitome of feminine erotic charm by the last ukiyo-e masters such
as Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), was giving way to the visual clich
of the sexually passive housewife and daughter.4 All sorts of print
media, such as newspapers, magazines, posters, ads, and postcards,
commoditized the stereotype of the domestic middle-class bijin
(beauty), fashionably dressed in traditional kimono, but replete
with romantic sensitivity and sentimental pathos, no matter whether
represented with naturalistic detail, or modeled on the decorative
style of art nouveau.5 When the Nihonga-yga divide became institutionalized in the governmental Bunten salon, initiated in 1907, pictures of beautiful women (bijinga) established itself as the generic
antithesis to yga nudes, which were displayed in a special room
(tokubetsu-shitsu) and accessible only to a privileged male elite of intellectuals and connoisseurs who were supposed to be capable of discriminating between voyeuristic pleasure and sexually disengaged
aesthetic judgment.6 As a result, the controversy over the difference
between Japanese and Western standards of artistic judgment
amounted to a war for and against the gendering of the male gaze.
As Donald Roden has noted, gender ambivalence pervaded Taish
popular and high art, producing such examples as the all-female
Takarazuka theater (founded in 1913), and more refined versions in

See the chapter by Melanie Trede in this volume.

See John Stevenson, Yoshitoshis Women. The Wooblock-print Series Fzoku Sanjnis
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, revised edition, 1995), p. 6.
5
For an overview of bijinga, see Hamanaka Shinji, Bijinga no tanj, soshite
genei [The birth and origin of bijinga], in Yamatane Bijutsukan, ed., The birth of
Bijinga (Bijinga no tanj) (Tokyo: Yamatane Museum of Art, 1997), pp. 6-19 and p. 63;
Helen Merritt, Nanako Yamada, eds., Woodblock Kuchi-e Prints: Reflections of Meiji Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), pp. 125-132.
6
Tsuruta Migiwa, Bunten to bijinga [Bunten and bijinga], in Yamatane Bijutsukan, ed., The Birth of Bijinga, pp. 160-168; see also Asahi Shinbun-sha ed., Kindai
Nihon gaka ga egaita rekishi to roman no josei-bi ten [Feminine beauty in history and romances as painted by modern Nihonga artists] (1989); and Nakamura Giichi, Bijutsu
ni okeru sei to kenryokuratai-ga rons [Power and sexuality in artthe dispute
on nude painting], in Nakamura Giichi, Nihon kindai bijutsu rons-shi [The history of
the dispute surrounding modern Japanese art] (Tokyo: Kyryd Library, 1981),
pp. 57-93. See also the essay by Jaqueline Berndt in this volume.
4

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267

genres such as literature.7 Yet, the visual arts have so far rarely been
investigated with respect to gender categories such as femininity and
masculinity and their impact on the Nihonga and yga configurations
of womanhood. Gender ambiguity is a factor to be reckoned with
in the field of pictorial symbolism when analyzing the visible and
invisible strategies of creating Nihonga high art.
The Western philosophy of high art enabled the appropriation
of a symbolic meaning of womanhood and the allegories of the spiritual and physical principles of love as symbolized by the Madonna
and Venus. Curtailed by the anti-pornography campaign of governmental censorship, and faced with Victorian sexual double-standards,
to Nihonga painters the virgin/whore dichotomy amounted to another
touchstone for creating indigenous symbols of femininity.
My chapter approaches the issue of gender by examining allegorical representations of womanhood in outstanding Nihonga works of
the Meiji and Taish eras. In Section One and Two I contend that
Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Mercy, provided into the 1920s a paradigm of the third gender, offering an escape from the boundaries
of gender difference. While Kan Hgai (1828-1888), the canonized
pioneer of New Nihonga, created Merciful Kannon (Hibo Kannon) in 1888
as a masculine manifestation of motherhood, Nude Woman (Rafu),
submitted in 1920 by Murakami Kagaku (1888-1939) to the Association for the Creation of National Painting (Kokuga ssaku kykai),
represents an allegory of the eternal woman in the guise of the
third gender of Kannon. The last two sections of my essay will
explore the work of Kainosh Tadaoto (1894-1978), a guest member
of the Kokuga Society and a paragon of Nihonga decadent painting.
Starting in 1918 with Yokogushi and inspired by his amateur training
as an onnagata performer, Kainosh extended Nihonga painting of
women towards the ambiguous eroticism of the Westernized femme
fatale and prostitute. It is my contention that in response to Buddhist
concepts of transgender, Western theories of sexual perversion, and
fin-de-sicle decadence, the notion of the third gender entered the

Donald Roden, Taish Culture and the Problem of Gender Ambivalence, in

J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity. Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 37-55; Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka, Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

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imagery of the New Woman as a nationalistic alternative to female

symbols of empowerment.
1. Kan Hgais Merciful Mother
Canonized in 1955 as an Important Cultural Treasure (jy bunkazai), Kan Hgais Merciful Kannon (Tokyo National University of Fine
Arts Museum) is considered a landmark in the history of the Nihonga
movement8 (Figure 9.1). The title Hibo Kannon, literally, Merciful
Kannon, was given to this monumental hanging scroll by Okakura
Kakuz in an article published in Kokka (February 1889) in commemoration of Hgais death the previous year. According to
Okakura, Hibo Kannon was conceived of as a representation of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitevara (Japanese, Kannon; Chinese, Kuanyin)
in his aspect of human maternity. Okakura justified this interpretation by reporting the masters lament about his year-long struggle
to come to terms with his idea of an ideal mother (ris-teki na
haha):
Once, the master told a man: Concerning human compassion, there
is nothing that compares with a mothers love for her children. Kannon
is the ideal mother. Out of his enormous compassion he gives birth
and nourishes all ten thousand things, and thus is the origin of creation.
For years I have tried to picture this idea but have not yet achieved
perfection.9

In the same Kokka article, Okakura expanded upon the excellent

idea (mys) of Hibo Kannon, which allowed him to place the painting
on the same level as famous Western masterworks such as Michelangelos Creation of Man in the Sistine Chapel. Although challenging
the value system of Western art history, Okakura had no problem

8
Sat Dshin, Meiji kokka to kindai bijutsu. Bi no seiji-gaku [The Meiji state and
modern art. The Politics of beauty] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1999), p. 300;
Martin Collcutt, The Image of Kannon as Compassionate Mother in Meiji Art and
Culture, in Ellen P. Conant, ed., Challenging Past and Present. The Metamorphosis of
Japanese Art in the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006),
pp. 197-224.
9
Okakura Kakuz Kan Hgai, published in Kokka, 2, November 1889; also
in Okakura Tenshin sh, Meiji Bungaku Zensh 38 (Tokyo: Chikuma shob, 1968),
pp. 300-311.

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269

Figure 9.1. Kan Hgai, Compassionate Kannon (Hibo Kannon), 1888; mounted painting,
ink and colors on silk, 211.8- 85.4 cm; Museum of the Tokyo National University
of Fine Arts. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on
pp. xvii-xxxii.

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relating Hibo Kannon to Buddhist as well as basic Christian doctrines,

such as the Virgin Birth and God the Creator.10
In Ideals of the East (1903) Okakura again explained the meaning
of Hibo Kannon for Western readers:
The last masterpiece of Kano Hogai represents Kwannon the Universal Mother, in her aspect of human maternity. She stands in mid-air,
her triple halo lost in the sky of golden purity, and holds in her hand
a crystal vase, out of which is dropping the water of creation. A single
drop, as it falls, becomes a babe, which, wrapped in its birth-mantle
like a nimbus, lifts unconscious eyes to her, as it is wafted downwards
to the rugged snow-peaks of the earth rising from a mist of blue darkness far below. In this picture a power of colour like that of the Fujiwara epoch joins with the grace of Maruyama [kyo], to afford
expression to an interpretation of nature as mystic and reverent as it
is passionate and realistic.11

Likening the milky nectar of immortality (amrita) dripping from the

bottle in Kannons right hand to the water of creation, Okakura
maintains that the transparent bubble with the child is floating downward toward the alpine mountain desert of our planet. Typologically,
however, the composition recalls the Rapid Descent of Amida
(Haya-raig) with Amitabha Buddha rushing down to earth with his
attendants Kannon and Seishi (Mahsthmaprpta) at the very
moment of the believers death. Why did Hgai reverse the raig
motif, having Kannon sending a child down to earth instead of taking the reborn human soul in the Western Paradise? Contrasting
with the statuesque figure of Kannon, the naked child in his embryonic bubble evokes anything but happy anticipation about his landing on the rocky landscape below. Most disturbing, however, is the
small moustache that contrasts with the benign smile and Madonnalike downcast eyes of Kannon. If meant to symbolize a mothers
solicitude for her child, why did Hgai represent Kannon as a male,
or at best, an androgynous, deity? The gender ambiguity of Kannon
jeopardizes the concept of Kannon as ideal mother right from the
outset.
Hgais pains over the works completion are documented through
various sketches drawn between his first Kannon painting created in
10

Cf. Collcutt, p. 209, note 24

Okakura Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East (Tokyo, Kenkyusha, 1941 [1903]),
p. 192.
11

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271

1883 (Freer Gallery) and 1888. They show numerous naked or partly
veiled female figures reminiscent of winged angels as well as of Buddhist heavenly maidens (tenj). These hybrid creatures look down on
clouds and waves that sometimes enclose a globe or moon. Detailed
studies of heads and faces worked without doubt to give Hibo Kannon
a more feminine expression, emulating Western prototypes12 (Figure
9.2). Shioya Jun points to the notable similarity between Madonna
images and the devotional look typical not only of Hgais Merciful
Kannon, but also of Meiji beauties in general.13
Yet, Hgai not only discarded his sketches of female celestials, but
surprisingly also dismissed the female prototypes among the thirtythree manifestations of Kannon as described in Lotus Sutra.14 Martin
Collcutt rightly observes that indigenous icons, such as Hariti (Kishimojin, Kariteimo), or so-called Maria-Kannon figures, secretly
worshiped and transmitted by hidden Christians from the seventeenth century onward, would have yielded ideal indigenous models
of the mother-and-child motif.15 What, then, was Hgais concept of
maternal compassion?
Recent studies regard the gender ambiguity of Hibo Kannon as a
prerequisite of the paintings political symbolism. Pointing to the
socialization of women in Meiji Japan, Wakakuwa Midori maintains
that Hgai conceived of Hibo Kannon as a protective deity and an
allegory of the reproductive and educational mission of women in
Imperial Japan.16 Chiba Kei has conversely argued that the painting
12
Kyoto National Museum, ed., Kano Hogai. The Pioneer of Modern Japanese Painting.
In Commemoration of the Centenary of his Death (Kyoto: Shinbunsha, 1989), fig. 142; Mizunoue Masaru, Hibo Kannon no shita-e [The sketches for Hibo Kannon], Sansai,
no. 254, 2 (1970): 32-41. Honda Kinkichir (1850-1921) exploited the winged angel
in his representation of the heavenly maiden Hagoromo, dated 1890 (Conant, Challenging Past, plate 5, cf. figure 7, p. 216).
13
Shioya Jun, Madonna no manazashiMeiji no bijinga wo meguru ikkosatsu
[The Gaze of MadonnaAn aspect of Meiji bijinga], in Yamatane Bijutsukan, The
Birth of Bijinga, p.151.
14
The art historian Umezawa Seiichi noted in 1919 that Hibo Kannon has no
prototype among the numerous manifestations of Bodhisattva Avalokitevara. Umezawa Seiichi, Hgai to Gah (Tokyo: Junsho bijutsusha, 1919), p. 224.
15
Collcutt, p. 218. Interestingly, in the 1860s the pioneer of yga and photography, Shima Kakoku (1827-1870), designed a Madonna-and-Child image in Japanese
dress. See Shioya, Madonna no manazashi, figs.1-2.
16
Wakakuwa Midori, Kg no shz: Shken Ktaig no kysh to josei no kokuminka
[Portraits of the empress: Representations of Empress Shoken and the nationalization of women] (Tokyo: Chikuma shob, 2001), p. 416.

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doris croissant

Figure 9.2. Kan Hgai, Sketches and drawings for Hibo Kannon, 1884-1888; hand
scroll, (detail), ink and color on paper, 37.5 507.2; Museum of the Tokyo National
University of Fine Arts.

gender play in modern japanese painting

273

symbolizes the parental double function of the Japanese Emperor,

who in his capacity as father and mother of the nation was supposed
to spread his grace on his children in times of peace as well as in
war.17
In view of Meiji body politics, it is tempting to see Merciful Kannon
as a symbol of the Japanese Emperor. However, would Hgai really
have dared to conceive of Meiji Tenn as a Buddhist deity, given
the governments forcible separation of Buddhism and State Shinto?
The government, at least, showed no interest in Hgais talent as
painter of Buddhist figures. When prime minister It Hirobumi
(1841-1909) at last commissioned a painting from Hgai in 1888, he
proposed the theme An Eagle, Grasping the Five Continents (tenka
wakeme), or The Decisive Battle of the Nation.18 Probably inspired
by the heraldic symbols of Western nation-states, Its order resulted
in a more-than-three-meter-high hanging scroll of a huge eagle.
Considering that Nihonga works met with little demand on the
domestic market, Fenollosas financial sponsorship and his advice to
adapt traditional subject matter and design to the taste of the Western
audience cannot be taken lightly. The revival of Buddhist themes in
the spirit of the Hegelian Idea was one of the main issues discussed
by Fenollosa in his lectures delivered to the Society for the Appreciation of Painting (Kangakai) from 1884 until his departure from Japan
in 1890.19 Back in America, Fenollosa profited from his art historical
knowledge not only as a writer, but also as a dealer of his own collection of Japanese art. Significantly, in 1902 he managed to sell
Kannon, the original version of Hibo Kannon, to Charles Freer, convincing him of the works historical importance. In fact, Hgai created
17

Chiba Kei, Kan Hgai Hibo Kannon o yomu [Reading Kano Hgais Hibo
Kannon], in Ikeda Shinobu, ed., Kenryoku to shikaku hysho III [Power and visual representation III] (Chiba: Chiba daigaku daigakuin shakai bunka kagaku kenkyka,
2003), pp. 48-65, especially pp. 56-57. Cf. Sat Dshin, Shudai no sentaku II: Kannon Kysai [Choice of motifs II: Kannon by Kysai], Journal of Kysai Study, vol. 8,
no. 74 (July 2003): 8-14 (my thanks go to Melanie Trede who drew my attention to
the articles cited above).
18
Kumamoto Kenjir, Kindai Nihon bijutsu no kenky [Studies on modern Japanese
art] (Tokyo: Tky kokuritsu bunkazai kenkyjo, 1964), p. 463; Kyoto National Museum, ed., Kano Hogai (1989), pl. 141.
19
See Doris Croissant, In Quest of the Real: Portrayal and Photography in
Japanese Painting Theory, in Conant, ed., Challenging Past and Present, pp. 153-176;
Doris Croissant, Das Geheimnis des Hibo Kannon, in Asiatische Studien/tudes Asiatiques XLIV, 2 (1990): 349-378.

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doris croissant

Kannon for the second, rather unsuccessful exhibition of Japanese

painting held in May 1884 in Paris, from whence it went into the
possession of Fenollosa.20 In Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, edited
by his widow in 1912, Fenollosa speculated that the idea of Kannon
derived from Guanyin with Fish Basket (Gyran Kannon), a painting bought
by Freer from the art dealer Yamanaka in 1904 and one that Fenollosa mistook for a Song copy of a masterwork by the Tang painter
Wu Daozhi (active 710-760).21 As a result, the putative correlation
between Guanyin with Fish Basket and the Freer Kannon and Hibo Kannon has haunted art historical hermeneutics up to the present. I have
argued elsewhere that, conversely, the Guanyin with Fish Basket is likely
a Meiji fake based on the model of the Hibo Kannon, yet, the similarities between both Kannon figures sheds light on the interplay of art
history writing, revivalist art production, and the expectations of
Western collectors of Japanese painting in the 1880s.22
Gyran Kannon is the most popular manifestation of Kannon in
a female guise. Chinese accounts of the Bodhisattva Guanyins facility
of transforming into a woman rest on the Song and Ming popular
identification of Mr. Mas Wife (Ch., Ma-lang fu; Jp., Merfu) with
the Woman from Yen-chou, a beautiful maiden living in the Tang
dynasty, who sold her body on the fish market so that men tormented
by sexual desire could attain enlightenment.23 In Edo Japan, tales
about manifestations of Kannon as a prostitute yielded comparisons
with the floating world of Yoshiwara, the most famous example

20

On the Freer Kannon, see Collcutt, p. 198, pp. 209 ff.

Ernest Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. An Outline History of East Asiatic Design. 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.; revised edition 1963 [1912]),
vol. 1, pp. 132 ff.
22
Croissant, Das Geheimnis, p. 352; see Collcutt, p. 213, on the Freer Gyran
Kannon. Gyran Kannon used to be depicted as a beautiful woman, but never as
Avalokitevara holding a fish basket and floating on clouds. As one of the canonical
thirty-three manifestations of Kannon (sanjsan-tai Kannon) she is pictured riding on a
large fish. See Kokusho kankkai,ed., Butsuz zui [Iconographical dictionary of Buddhist figures, First edition 1690] (Tokyo: Kysha, 1972), p. 48.
23
Barbara E. Reed, The Gender Symbolism of Kuan-yin Bodhisattva, in Jose
Ignacio Cabezon, ed., Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1992), pp. 159-180. Yu Chun-fang, Guanyin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitevara, in Marsha Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the Law: Images of
Chinese Buddhism 850-1850 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 151181.
21

gender play in modern japanese painting

275

being the Eguchi theme and its adaptation in popular art.24 The
equation of Kannon with courtesans lasted into Meiji literature as
proven by Natsume Ssekis famous novel Botchan (1906), in which
he features a beautiful prostitute who bears the nickname Kannon.
One might speculate, then, that Hgai equipped his Hibo Kannon with
a moustache in order to exclude any association with the female
manifestation of Gyran Kannon and its connection with prostitutes.
When seen in the context of Nihonga historicism, in form and content Merciful Kannon complied with Hgais efforts at reconstructing
the style and meaning of the lost art of such famous Chinese masters
as Wu Daozhi. As an image that reflects Meiji gender politics, on
the other hand, the work underscores patriarchal domination over
the nations offspring in guise of Buddhist iconographic conventions.
In as much as Merciful Kannon attributes the mystery of childbirth to
a male mother, it challenges the basic facts of biological motherhood, and thus represents an Anti-Madonna, or even, as Chiba Kei
puts it, a phallic mother and a symbol of the castration anxiety
induced by the rise in the empowerment of women.25
Among later Nihonga painters, the gender puzzle of Merciful Kannon
yielded a fascination with the transgender symbolism of Gyran Kannon, the Buddhist epitome of the holy whore. Shimomura Kanzan
(1873-1930), a pupil of Hgai and member of the Tokyo-based Japanese Art Academy (Nihon bijutsuin), founded in 1898 by Okakura,
conceived several versions of Gyran Kannon. The first one, created
in 1910, is an allusion to the famous Daitokuji triptych Crane, Kannon
and Monkey by the Zen painter Muqi (active late 13th c.), showing in
place of Kannon an Indian beauty with a basket walking to the fish
market.26 In 1928 Kanzan created one more version of Gyran Kannon, presenting the legendary Tang maiden in the guise of Mona

24
Timothy Clark, Prostitute as Bodhisattva: The Eguchi Theme in Ukiyoe,
Impressions 22 (2000): 37-53.
25
Chiba Kei, Sens to Hibo Kannon, Image & Gender, vol. 6, 3 (2006): 20.
26
Yokohama bijutsukan, ed., Taikan to Kanzan ten [Exhibition of Taikan and Kanzan] (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1990), figs. 25/78, cf. 81. The hanging scrolls
Crane, Kannon and Monkey (late 13th century), attributed to Mu Qi, are preserved in
Daitokuji Temple, Kyoto.

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doris croissant

Lisa.27 At this stage, as we will see below, the Giocondas smile was
broadly understood not only as indicating erotic seduction, but also
as a signifier of the androgynous charms of the third sex.
2. Murakami Kagakus Eternal Woman
In the Taish era, Nihonga painters aimed not only at a systematic
exploration of Western period styles and canonized masterworks from
the Renaissance to modernism, but also to demonstrate that Meijiperiod moral scruples had given way to a conscious effort to conquer
modernism. Guided by the Francophile art historian Nakai Star
(1879-1966), in 1918 five Kyoto painters, among them Murakami
Kagaku (1888-1939), organized the Association for the Creation of
National Painting (Kokuga ssaku kykai ) with the intention of staying independent of governmental control over aesthetic matters. 28
The statement of purpose of the Kokuga Society, presented to the
press in 16 January 1918, starts with the sentence: Concerning the
founding of the Kokuga ssaku kykai, we want to establish right
away that our purpose is the production of pure art (junshin naru
geijutsu) and, by making this art available to the public, to contribute to the development of Japanese art in general.29 The five founding members specialized in traditional painting genres such as
landscape, flower and trees, or paintings of women that they sought
to westernize by emulating European masters from the Renaissance
to French Post-Impressionism. Mostly mounted as Western-style tab-

27
Hosono Masanobu, Shimomura Kanzan. Kindai no bijutsu 9 (Tokyo: Shibund,
1982), fig. 98.
28
On the Kokuga Society see National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo et al.,
eds., Kyto no Nihonga 1910-1930. Taish no kokoro, kakushin to sz [Nihonga: the Kyoto
School 1910-1930] (1986); Conant, Transcending the Past, pp. 106-107; John Donald
Szostak, The The Kokuga Ssaku Kykai and Kyto Nihonga Reform in the Meiji, Taish and
Early Showa Years (1900-1928) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2005), p. 225.
29
Quoted from Szostak, p. 620; see also pp. 248 ff. Kyto Kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan/Tky kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan, eds., Kokuga Sosaku Kyokai Retrospective
(1993), pp. 160-161. The Societys statement of purpose (riysho) was signed on 16
January 1918 by Ono Chikky, Tsuchida Bakusen, Murakami Kagaku, Nonogase
Banka and Sakakibara Shih; the same painters, but including Takeuchi Seih and
Nakai Star, signed the manifesto (sengensho) promulgated on 20 January 20 1918
(see Szostak, pp. 248 ff.).

gender play in modern japanese painting

277

leau paintings, these works were possibly meant to decorate the reception rooms of Western-style houses.30
The Kokuga painter Murakami Kagaku chose Italian Renaissance
painting and religious themes as his model, but still adhered to the
lumping together of Buddhist and Western ideals of womanhood.
His Nude Woman (Rafu), submitted in 1920 to the third Kokuga exhibition, depicts a slightly veiled, half-naked Indian woman adorned
with necklaces and earrings, sitting on a well close to a tray with
lotus flowers31 (Figure 9.3). In his essay The Eternal woman, written in 1920, Murakami commented on the allegorical meaning of
his Nude Woman:
In all human beings, whether they like it or not, there is a longing for
beauty. I believe that this is what the Eternal Woman (kuon no josei)
symbolizes. But neither normal women nor men can attain our ideal
of a perfectly virtuous woman. I think the reason is that this ideal
transcends sexuality and resides only in what is called the third sex
(chsei). Assuming that we take Kannon as the perfect incorporation of
the good and the beauty that embodies all human ideals and longings
in his physical appearance, then we may be right to consider the third
sex as something also essential to the Eternal Woman.

He goes on to explain:
At this point the fundamental difference between the Western world
and Asia comes to the fore. European thought from Greece to Hellenism and Hebraism stresses the rarely-surmounted antagonism between
body and spirit that corresponds to the usually unending battle between
soul and flesh. Yet in Asia, and especially in India, such a binary did not
exist. There, I believe, body and spirit were unified and harmonized.
What was considered flesh was at the same time spirit. While in Europe
culture developed in opposition to nature, Indian culture developed out
of nature. While in Europe humanity is conceived as the other of nature, in India men and nature are commonly understood to be one.
The year before last, when I undertook to paint Nude Woman as an
aspect of the Eternal Woman which is the beginning and end of humans eternal longing (although being aware of my poor talent and
numerous shortcomings), I simultaneously wished to express the purity
of Kannon and Kanzeon Bosatsu through the womans eyes as well as
30
See Jordan Sand, The Cultured Life as Contested Space. Dwelling and Discourse in the 1920s, in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan:
Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
2000), pp. 99-118.
31
See Szostak, pp. 337-340 on the reception of Nude Woman and a caricature by
Okamoto Ippei (1920).

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doris croissant

Figure 9.3. Murakami Kagaku, Nude Woman (Rafu), 1920; mounted painting, color
on silk, 163.6 109.1 cm; Yamatane Museum. A color plate of this illustration can
be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

gender play in modern japanese painting

279

through her swelling breasts. What I wanted to visualize was the beauty
of the Eternal Woman that lies in flesh as well as in spirit, in hair as
much as in the mouth, in arms as well as in feet, a beauty that encompasses all the so-called virtues in harmony.32

With his firstand to my knowledge, onlypainting of a naked

woman, Murakami seemingly complied with the market-oriented
strategy of Kokuga artists who had explored erotic subject such as
geisha and prostitutes since the societys first exhibition in 1918. Yet,
Murakamis concept of an Asian Venus took inspiration from Japanese Buddhist art and Ajanta murals. What remained certainly not
unnoticed by the educated public was the paintings source in Indian
Buddhist art: while reminiscent of the voluptuous body of a female
yakshini, Nude Woman emulates the gesture of a Bodhisattva holding
a lotus flowera sign of enlightenment and purity well known from
the famous fresco with Avalokitevara (Padmapani) in Ajanta Cave
1 (Figure 9.4).
In his notes written between 1919 and 1939, Murakami expanded
repeatedly on the relation between religion and art, claiming that he
practiced painting like a prayer in the closet (misshitsu no inori). 33
His early articles echo the debate about the Platonic dichotomy
between the carnal and spiritual aspects of Erosamong Taish
intellectuals apparently an issue that fuelled speculation about the
distinction between male and female sexual desire. In a note written
in 1919, Murakami described his infatuation with the gilded statue
of Sh-Kannon, created in 1226 by Jokei II and still extant in Kuramadera north of Kyoto.34
If I were to keep this statue in my home, I would adore it from morning to evening. This figure possesses a completely feminine shape.
Every inch of it makes me think of the body of Venus (although there
are different types of it), and the red color gives an impression as if
real blood was running through the body, encased in a beautiful skin.
The half-closed eyes (hosoku hiraku me) look as if they knew everything
about human fate from beginning to end. I believe that his love (ai) is

32
Murakami Kagaku, Kuon no josei [The Eternal Woman], in Murakami
Kagaku, Garon [On painting] (Tokyo: Ch kron bijutsu shuppan. 1972),
pp. 51-52.
33
Murakami Kagaku, Garon, p. 27.
34
Reproduced in Akiyama, Terukazu et al. eds., Genshoku Nihon no bijutsu, vol. 9
(Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1967-1980), pl. 81.

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Figure 9.4. Ajanta, cave 1, fresco of Padmapani (Avalokitevara), 6th century.

gender play in modern japanese painting

281

born from a wisdom completely different from the suspicion upon

wisdom (chi-e no giwaku) of Mona Lisa.35

Why did Murakami contrast the half-closed eyes of this Bodhisattva

statue to the suspicious gaze and smile of Mona Lisa (Figure 9.11)?
Was he acquainted with the writings of purveyors of fin-de-sicle
aestheticism such as the art historian Walter Pater (1839-1894), who
called Mona Lisa, due to her eternal wisdom, a vampire and symbol
of the modern idea?36 I assume what intrigued Murakami at first
was the semantic congruity between the smile of Mona Lisa and the
archaic smile of Buddhist figures, a phenomena also noted by
Fenollosa regarding the facial features of the Kuze Kannon.37 Considering
that the enlightened state of transcending gender division through
non-discrimination (mushabetsu) manifested itself in the archaic smile
of bodhisattva images, the smile of the exemplary Western beauty
Mona Lisa was critically at odds with conventional gender norms.
In his comment on Nude Woman, Murakami, therefore, arrived at the
amazing compromise that we may be right to consider the third
sex (chsei) as something also essential to the Eternal Woman.38
Murakami was most certainly familiar with the writings of the
English anthropologist Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), who argued
in his study on the intermediate sex, published in 1907, that the
cultivation of male-male love amounted to the highest achievement
of samurai knighthood. Carpenter maintained that, similar to Dorian
Greece, the samurai way of love (shud, nanshoku) fostered true comradeship and loyalty to the Emperor. Thanks to the cultivation of
homosexual love, the Japanese army remained victorious in her war

35
Murakami Kagaku, Butsuz zakkan [Random thoughts on Buddhist figures]
(1919), in Murakami, Garon, p.15.
36
Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 179; Walter Pater, She is older than the rocks among which
she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and has been a diver in
deep seas . . . Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy,
the symbol of the modern idea. From The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 4th ed.
(London, 1893), quoted in Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading, (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 41.
37
Stefan Tanaka, Imaging History: Inscribing Belief in the Nation, The Journal
of Asian Studies 53, 1 (February, 1994): 25.
38
See Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-male sexuality in Japanese
Discourse, 1600-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 193.

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doris croissant

against Russia.39 Carpenters conflation of homoeroticism and samurai

ethics was perhaps not unknown to sexologists such as Habuta Eiji
and Sawada Junjir, who started around 1915 to explore the psychology behind what they called the mystery of same sex love. 40 But,
interestingly, Carpenter owed his popularity to the initiative of the
feminist Yamakawa Kikue (1890-1980), a social critic and member
of the Bluestockings (Seit), who in 1914 published an abridged translation of his text in the journal Safuran.41
Of course, feminist fascination with homosexuality was not apt to
change Murakamis line of thought: while denying women the power
of matching the sublime longings of men, he localized the ideal woman
in India as the origin of Asian culture, and thus, implicitly, signaled
his dismay with the emergence of the New Woman in modernizing
Japan.
With Nude Woman Murakami visually expatriated the eternal
woman from Japanese territory and located the Asiatic Venus in
the exotic mysteries of India. As we shall see below, it would appear
that Murakamis Nude Woman constituted a hypothetical counterpart
to the concept of the fallen woman as conceived by his younger
colleague and protg, Kainosh Tadaoto (1894-1977), in his Yokogushi, the first picture of a Japanese femme fatale.
3. Kainosh Tadaotos Queering of the Female Image
Between 1918 and 1920, the Kokuga Society used the broad effectiveness of Tokyo and Kansai department stores to test the consumers willingness to buy a surrogate modernism of pure art,
manufactured in Japans old political centre, Kyoto. Images of prostitutes, in particular, underlined the modernity of Kyoto Nihonga.
In December 1918, the Kokuga Society organized its first exhibition
39
Edward Carpenter, Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk. A Study in Social Evolution (London: George Allen& Co., 1914 [1907], Kessinger Publishers reprint),
pp. 137-160.
40
Habuto Eiji and Sawada Junjir, Hentai seiyokuron (Tokyo: Shunyd, 1915);
Sawada Junjir, Shinpi naru dseiai [The Mystery of homosexual love], 2 vols. (Tokyo:
Tenkad shob, 1920); quoted in Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, p. 253.
41
Gregory M. Pflugfelder, S is for Sister: Schoolgirl Intimacy and Same-SexLove in Early Twentieth-Century Japan, in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno,
eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005), p. 168

gender play in modern japanese painting

283

in the Tokyo department store Shirokiya. Kainosh Tadaoto recollected later that in preparation for this event the prestigious member
Murakami Kagaku encouraged him to join as a guest.42 The thentwenty-three year old graduate from Kyoto City Specialized School
for Painting (Kyto shiritsu kaiga senmon gakk) had already established his reputation as a painter of kabuki actors and courtesans,
developing a painting technique that enabled him to render the corporeality of bodies of Western oil painting with the opaque mineral
pigments of Nihonga. The first extant example of his new style is the
partly overpainted tableau Yokogushi (Hiroshima kokuritsu kindai
bijutsukan), submitted to the 1st Kokuga exhibition in 1918, but
probably conceived or already executed in 1915 as Kainoshs graduation piece for the Specialized School of Painting (Figure 9.5).
The title Yokogushiliterally Side-Combstands for Otomi, the
quintessential evil woman (akuba) of kabuki domestic pieces (sewamono), in the play Scarface Otomi (Kirare Otomi) by Kawakami Mokuami
(1816-1893).43 Scarface Otomi is a gender-crossing remake of Kirare Yosa
(also called Yohana (Yowa) nasake ukina no yokogushi), written by Segawa
Jok III (1806-1881), and staged for the first time in 1853 at Edos
Nakamura-za theater. In Mokuamis 1864 version, in place of the
male hero, now Otomi, the mistress of a brothel proprietor, falls
victim to her patrons jealousy and the patron sets out to end her
love affair with Yosa by mutilating her with knife cuts all over her
face. Otomi and her lover try to commit suicide, but are rescued.
Bereft of her beauty and her lover, Otomi marries Bat Yasu (Kmori
no Yasu), a former servant of her patron. She meets Yosa again after
years of separation, but now being a disfigured and aged woman,
she takes revenge upon her patron by blackmailing him and extorting

42
Kyoto kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan, ed., Kainosh Tadaoto ten [Kainosh Tadaoto
Exhibition] (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1997), p. 129; Chiba shiritsu bijutsukan, ed., Kainosh Tadaoto to Taish-ki no gaka-tachi. [Kainosh Tadaoto and Painters
of the Taish era] (Toyko: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1999), p. 117; Tanaka Hisao,
Kainosh Tadaoto kaikoten ni kanren shite [On the memorial exhibition of Kainosh Tadaoto], Sansai, no. 346 (1976): 17-20; cited in Szostak, pp. 304-307.
43
On Scarface Otomi (Kirare Otomi, also called Wakaba no Ume Ukina no Yokogushi or
Musume Gonomi Ukina no Yokogushi), see Samuel. L. Leiter, New Kabuki Encyclopedia
(Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 714. For a translation of Kirare Otomi, see
James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter, Kabuki Plays on Stage, vol. 3: Darkness and
Desire, 1804-1864 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 320-356.

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doris croissant

Figure 9.5. Kainosh Tadaoto (1894-1977), Yokogushi, 1918, mounted painting, color
on silk, 164.5 71.4 cm; Hiroshima Prefectural Museum of Modern Art. A color
plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

gender play in modern japanese painting

285

Figure 9.6. Kainosh Tadaoto, Yokogushi, circa 1916 (?), mounted painting, colors on
silk, 195.0 84.0 cm; Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art.

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money, and moreover, kills her greedy husband, Yasu, so that her
former lover is able to redeem his heirloom sword.44
Several shibai-e triptychs, printed about 1864, depict the climactic
murder scene by staging it in a graveyard with Yosa at the left and
Otomi brandishing a kitchen knife at Bat Yasu at the right. On a
print by Toyohara Kunichika (1835-1900), we see Otomi characterized as a Fukagawa courtesan, with a chic boxwood comb worn
aslant the side of her head and a checkered black-and-white haorijacket thrown over her shoulders (Figure 9.7).
Two decades after the first performance of Scarface Otomi, the
depravity of the evil woman was no longer symbolized through
her criminal acts such as blackmailing, robbery, and murder, but
was put on a level with pornographic offences against public morals.
This change can be seen in a hanging scroll by Kobayashi Eitaku
(1843-1890), datable to around 188545 (Figure 9.8). The scrolls subject
is simply given as A Woman in a Danjur Robe, but the boxwood comb
and bath-robe imprinted with the crest of the actor Ichikawa Danjur
suggest a certain affinity to the kabuki heroine Otomi. Posing as a
beauty after her bath (yu-agari bijin), the figure exposes her private
parts in an overt manner.46 While actor prints foreground the narrative context with Otomi as a furious murderess, Eitaku generalizes
the connection between kabuki and prostitution. Eitaku was one of
the few Nihonga painters who sought to exploit the nude for didactic
purposes, shortly before the anti-pornography campaign of 1889
prohibited painters from depicting naked woman. 47 The Taishperiod painter Kainosh Tadaoto, on the other hand, presented

44
On poison women in Meiji narratives, see Christine Marran, Poison woman: Takahashi Oden and the Spectacle of Female Deviancy in early Meiji, USJapan Womens Journal (English supplement) 9, (1995): 93-110; Hirata Yumi, The
Story of the Woman, the Woman of the Story: Takahashi Oden and the Discourse
of the Poison Woman, in Wakita Haruko, Anne Bouchy, and Ueno Chizuko, eds.,
Gender and Japanese History (Osaka: Osaka University Press, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 221252.
45
Otsu City Museum of History, ed., Unexplored Avenues of Japanese Painting: The
Hakutakuan Collection. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), pl. 80, pp. 182183.
46
The design of a sickle (kama), a circle (wa), and the hiragana character nu painted
on the mounting read kamawanu,, translatable as I dont care The pattern is
said to have been invented by Ichikawa Danjur VII (1791-1859), though its relation
to the painting is not clear. See Leiter, New Kabuki Encyclopedia, p. 265.
47
See the chapter by Jaqueline Berndt in this volume.

gender play in modern japanese painting

287

Figure 9.7. Toyohara Kunichika (1835-1900), Scarface Otomi, 1864, woodblock print;
Waseda University.

Otomi as a morally corrupt but alluring woman, endowing her with

the smile and gaze of the Mona Lisa.
The original state of Yokogushi today remains only as a postcard.48
Posing in front of a standing screen painted with peonies, Otomi
48
Kainosh Tadaoto ten, (1997), p. 25 When Kainosh restored the painting in the
1920s, he replaced the actor-portrait with a large cartouche with a calligraphic inscription that certified that the work had been displayed at the first Kokuga exhibition of 1918.

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doris croissant

Figure 9.8. Kobayashi Eitaku (1843-1890), Woman in Danjur Robe, circa 1885, hanging scroll, colors on silk, 106.0 41.5 cm; Hakutakuan Collection, Seattle.

gender play in modern japanese painting

289

wears a kimono decorated with four heads of Kabuki actors. Spread

under her feet on the floor is a white fabric with a red Danjurpattern that points to her relation with kabuki (Figure 9.5). As if
pasted on the peony screen in the background was a large actor-print
depicting an onnagata in the role of Otomi with a horse tail wig
(uma no shippo) and a checkered kimono, the face and arms heavily
mutilated by scars.
In another recently discovered version of Yokogushi (Kyoto National
Museum of Modern Art), the kimono pattern symbolically underlines
the depravity of Otomi: holding hellish punishment against heavenly
joy, her fancy dress is painted with a devil riding on flames and
Buddhist angels (tennin) flying over the blue collar49 (Figure 9.6). The
womans white-powdered face and red-lined eyes suggest a morbid
condition, reminiscent of the pale make-up of Western actresses
known from theater and cinema. This slightly larger version may
have been created on private commission after the color postcards
had spread the fame of the original Yokogushi all over Japan.
Many years later, Kainosh recorded the circumstances that made
him conceive Yokogushi. He maintained that in summer 1915 he
attended a performance of Kirare Otomi at the Minami-za in Tokyo
together with his brothers wife. Deeply impressed by the performance of Sawamura Gennosuke IV (1859-1936), back home he
cross-dressed as an onnagata, competing with his sister-in-law in their
impersonation of Otomi.50
In the original version of Yokogushi, the juxtaposition of the corporeal image of Otomi with her impersonator on the actor-print raises
questions concerning the gender identity of the evil woman. Should
we read Yokogushi as the portrait of a contemporary woman in fancy
dress performing as Otomi, or did Kainosh draw a self-portrait in
onnagata guise, playfully staging a Westernized Otomi modeled after
the Mona Lisa? The artists fascination with onnagata cross-dressing is
documented by numerous photographs taken during amateur per49

Kainosh Tadaoto ten (1997), p. 24.

See Kainosh Tadaoto ten (1997), pp. 128-129, for references to Kainoshs rather contradictory recollections of the genesis of Yokogushi. The play Kirare Otomi with
Sawamura Gennosukes IV (1859-1936) in the role of Otomi was staged in July in
Kyoto prior to the Minamiza production running from 31 August to 15 September
1915. Since Kainoshs sister-in-law died in Tokyo on 26 August 26 1915, it is unlikely that he would have visited the kabuki performance during mourning. See
Leiter, New Kabuki Encyclopedia, p. 558.
50

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formances in the painters studio. Datable to about 1920, one picture

shows Kainosh in onnagata guise as he mimics the Mona Lisa smile
in front of one of his numerous Otomi bust portraits (Figure 9.10)
The gaze at the beholder endows Yokogushi with an iconic persuasiveness, also found on an actor-print created by Natori Shunsen
(1886-1960) in 191751 (Figure 9.9). Shunsen designed this small tanzaku print for the publisher Watanabe Shzabur (1885-1962), the
initiator and export manager of the Shin-Hanga movement of NeoUkiyo-e woodblock prints.52 Patterned on an off-stage photograph
of the famous onnagata Onoe Baiko VI (1870-1934) in the role of
Otomi, but deviating from this photograph, the onnagata gazes invitingly at the viewer as if mimicking a Western woman, like those
portrayed by the Shinpa actress Matsui Sumako (1886-1919), who
played Nora in Ibsens The Doll House, staged in Japan in 1911.53
Yokogushi and Shunsens actor-print attest to the influence that
Western portraiture and portrait photography exerted about 1915
on the image of the typical sexy woman. As a rule, female sitters
in Japan avoided looking straight into the camera, whereas courtesans
established eye contact as a sign of seduction, as demonstrated by
photographs taken of famous Tokyo geisha in the late 1880s.54 Also
offending against seemly demeanor is the alluring gaze of poster girls
on ads of the Mitsukoshi department store and other product posters
for beer, sake and cosmetics that developed from 1913 in collaboration with the flourishing printing industry.55 Renowned poster designers such as Hashiguchi Goy (1880-1921), who graduated in 1905
in Western-style painting from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and

51
Kushigata Shunsen Museum of Art, ed., Natori Shunsen: Kushigata chritsu Shusen
Bijutsukan shoz Natori Shunsen sakuhin mokuroku (Kushigata: Yamanashi nichi-nichi
shinbunsha, 2002), p. 19.
52
See footnote 74.
53
Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman, pp. 1-14; see also Dina Lowy, Nora and the
New Woman: Visions of Gender and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Japan, U.S.-Japan Womens Journal, no. 26 (2004): 75-97.
54
See Yamatane bijutsukan, The Birth of Bijinga, fig. 57. Christine Guth noted
that in Meiji tourist photography the image of happily laughing geishas and prostitutes coined the clich of female hospitality. Christine M.E. Guth, Longfellows Tattoos:
Tourism, Collecting, And Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), pp. 8283.
55
Yamatane bijutsukan, The Birth of Bijinga, figs. 57, pp. 115-118. Teramoto Minako, ed., Bijin no tsukurikata: Sekihan kara hajimaru kkoku posuta [Making beauty: early
Japanese lithographic posters] (Tokyo: Insatsu hakubutsukan, 2007), figs. 14-19.

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291

Figure 9.9. Natori Shunsen (1886-1960), Onoe Baiko as Otomi, 1917, woodblock
print.

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Figure 9.10. Kainosh, performing as an onnagata in front of a painting, photograph,

ca. 1920.

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293

Figure 9.11. Leonardo da Vinci (1479-1528), Portrait of Mona Lisa, 1503-1506, oil on
wood, 77.0 53 cm; Muses du Louvre, Paris.

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the Osaka painter Kitano Tsunetomi (1880-1947), an influential

member of the Kansai decadents and guest member of the Kokuga
Society, drew freely on Western rather than on indigenous prototypes
of female beauty.56 In contrast to Kitanos child-like beauties, however, the smiling Yokogushi calls masculine dominance into question
as she suggests, with her knowing look, an intellectual superiority to
male desire.
About two years after his debut at the first Kokuga exhibition,
Kainosh painted the half-length portrait of A Woman of Shimabara
(Shimabara no onna), showing a woman with the hairstyle of a top-rank
Edo courtesan (tay) with four tortoiseshell pins and silvery ornaments,
her face and neck covered with white make-up (Figure 9.12). Wearing a simple, dark blue kimono with white cherry pattern over red
and pale blue under-robes, she looks down thoughtfully at a colorful
hair ornament (kanzashi) in her right hand, something that normally
graced the coiffure of maiko apprentices The portrait emulates the
Louvre painting St. Anne, Mary, and Child, another famous work by
Leonardo, the cartoon of which had been reproduced in the influential art journal Shirakaba in November 1914 (Figure 9.13).57 The
downcast eyes and the contemplative smile give the courtesan the
benign expression of St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin.58
At this stage, we can only speculate that Kainosh was familiar
with the role that St. Anne, Mary, and Child played in Freuds famous
treatise on Leonardo da Vincis childhood, published in 1910.59 In
this treatise on the pathological workings of the unconscious, Freud
construed a connection between St. Anne in the Louvre painting
and Leonardos affection for his phallic step-mother, whom Freud
made responsible for the artists oedipal complex. More momentous,
however, is the fact that Kainosh shared his admiration of Leonardo
56

See the chapter by Jaqueline Berndt in this volume, Figure 10.12.

Shirakaba, vol. 5/11 (1914), following p. 208.
58
While Woman of Shimabara represents the motherly type of courtesan, about
1921 Kainosh elaborated a grimacing, demonic type of Edo courtesans. (Kainosh
Tadaoto ten, (1997), pp. 34-37).
59
Sigmund Freud published Die Frau und das Unterbewusste in 1910. For an English
translation, see Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Art &
Literature, Penguin Freud Library, 14 (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). On
the presumption that creativity is rooted in the experience of early childhood, Freud
identified St. Anne with Leonardos step-mother. Growing up under the wings of his
phallic mother, Leonardo is supposed of having developed an at least latent homoerotic orientation.
57

gender play in modern japanese painting

295

Figure 9.12. Kainosh Tadaoto, Woman of Shimabara (Shimabara no onna), 1920,

mounted painting, colors on silk, 69.0 43.0 cm; private collection.

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Figure 9.13. Leonardo da Vinci (1479-1528), St. Anne, Madonna, and Child, 1508-1513,
oil on canvas, Muses du Louvre, Paris.

gender play in modern japanese painting

297

with the vanguard of contemporary yga painters. An exemplary case

is the painter and poet Murayama Kaita (1896-1919), whose life and
literary work have been impressively researched by Jeffrey Angles. 60
Murayama Kaita adored Leonardo to the extent that he imagined
him as his rival in matters of love. In his short novel The Bust of the
Beautiful Young Salaino, written circa 1913 to 1914 but published posthumously in 1921, Murayama records a dream in which he saw
himself competing with Leonardo for the love of a beautiful disciple. 61
In the same piece, Leonardo himself is said to bear the boyish,
mysterious smile of Mona Lisa. Angles also notes that after his return
from France in 1909, the sculptor Takamura Ktar (1883-1956)
introduced the Mona Lisa as a poetic metaphor of lost love. This artist
likened the facial expression of Yoshiwara prostitutes to the hidden
smile (la sourire cache) of the intimidating and unapproachable
lady.62
Commensurate with gender inversion, the art and life of Leonardo
provided opposing modes of artistic self-expression to gay yga and
Nihonga painters.63 While Murayama Kaita articulated his homoerotic
fantasies by likening the Mona Lisa to the charms of beautiful boys
(bishnen), Kainosh projected the transgender aesthetics of Leonardos figures onto his phantom images of the Westernized dangerous
woman. Through his training as a kabuki female impersonator,
Kainosh might have resorted to the gender play of the onnagata who
represents, according to Leiter, an abstraction or symbolization of
the image of Japanese womanhood, both on a physical and emotional level.64 Yet, while experiencing the feminizing gender training of the female impersonator, as a specialist in the painting of
women, Kainosh assumed a masculine, at times clear-cut, misogy-

60
See Jeffrey Matthew Angles, Writing the love of boys: representations of male-male
desire in the literature of Murayama Kaita and Edogawa Ranpo (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 2004); http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc
_num=osu1071535574.
61
Murayama Kaita, Bishnen Saraino no kubi, translated in Angles,
pp. 315-317.
62
Angles, p. 35.
63
In the early 1920s a patron of Kainosh, a resident of Kobe, instructed Kainosh and his long-time partner, the painter Sakakibara Shik (1895-1969) (a younger brother of the Kokuga founding member Sakakibara Shih), in the way of
nanshoku. See Shimada Yasuhiro, in Kainosh Tadaoto ten (1997), p. 12).
64
Leiter, New Kabuki Encyclopedia, p. 500.

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nist perspective towards the female body.65 The projection of Leonardos androgynous saints onto Japanese prostitutes betrays a
destructive rather than celebratory exploitation of the European ideals of beauty. In this regard, Kainosh anticipated the computerized
self-portraits as art history by the post-modern artist Morimura
Yasumasa (born 1950).66
The leading Kokuga painter, Tsuchida Bakusen (1887-1936),
envisaged Japan as an earthly paradise, alive with various types of
Japanese women, such as pearl divers, Ohara peasant women (Oharame), maiko, and bath-house girls (yuna), but significantly void of male
partners, who might suggest the pleasures (and perils) of erotic
encounter.67 Between Bakusen and Kainosh the painting of women
remained a contested field, especially after Kainosh tried his hand
at nude painting, a genre up till then under taboo, but at last tolerated as a subject of Kokuga decadent pure art.
Kokuga exhibitions were suspended between 1921 and 1924 due
to the main members trip to Europe. The direct encounter with
European art resulted in the appointment of the Kyoto painter Umehara Ryzabur (1888-1986), a follower of Renoir, as head of the
newly established Kokuga yga section.68 It appears to have been the
prospective competition between Nihonga and yga oil painting that
stimulated Kainosh to submit to the 5th Kokuga exhibition of 1926
two nude paintings labeled Woman with Balloon (also called Chch)
(Figure 9.14) and Nude (Rafu) (Figure 9.15).69 Today only a photograph of Woman with Balloon remains, depicting a semi-nude woman,
veiled in a dark, transparent bath-rope, holding a fetishistic balloon.
Presiding over the selection committee, Bakusen disqualified Woman
with Balloon, not on the grounds that is was kitsch, but for being a
65
Maki Morinaga, The Gender of Onnagata as the Imitating Imitated: Its Historicity, Performativity, and Involvement in the Circulation of Femininity, positions:
east asia cultures critique, volume 10, number 2 (Fall 2002): 263.
66
See Morimura Yasumasa, Self-portrait as Art History (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha,
1998).
67
Doris Croissant, Icons of Feminity. Japanese National Painting and the Paradox of Modernism, in Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill,
eds., Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2003), pp. 119-139.
68
Szostak, pp. 405 ff.
69
Kokuga Sosaku Kyokai Retrospective, plates 57 and 58; Kainosh Tadaoto ten (1997),
p. 48 and p. 115. The venue of the 5th Kokuga exhibition, March 7 to 21, was an
exhibition hall in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

gender play in modern japanese painting

299

Figure 9.14. Kainosh Tadaoto, Woman with balloon (Chch), 1926 (destroyed).

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Figure 9.15. Kainosh Tadaoto, Nude (Rafu), mounted painting, 1926, colors on silk,
132.0 51.5 cm; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

gender play in modern japanese painting

301

filthy picture (kitanai-e).70 Accepted for display together with Nude

was Singing Geisha Girl (Kagi), a work that again underlined the gender
ambivalence of the prostitute (Figure 9.16). This is made clear by
the genesis of both paintings: Kainosh in both cases used photographs taken of models posing for him in his atelier, yet for Singing
Geisha Girl he employed a slender cross-dressing man with the pale
complexion and composed looks of a male prostitute, holding a
shamisen.71 (Figure 9.17). The choice of a male double suggests that
Kainosh rated the androgynous charms of a cross-dressed man
higher than the exemplariness of a female geisha.
Today, Kainosh is acclaimed as the paragon of Taish aestheticism (tanbi shugi) and a genius of bijinga (bijinga no kisai). The English
introduction to the Kyto exhibition catalogue of 1997 praises his
straightforward paintings of women for catching more directly
the inescapable karma that exists within women.72 Whatever the
inescapable karma of women might be, the current rehabilitation
of Kainosh as a bijinga specialist is certainly not in tune with the
genres accepted definition. One of the chief proponents of academic
bijinga, the female Kyoto painter Uemura Shen (1875-1949), claimed
that she intended to dissipate any indecent thoughts about the other
sex as her works visualized the dreams and longings of women in
accordance with truth, morality, and beauty.73 Kaburagi Kiyokata
(1878-1972), a follower of the ukiyo-e artist Yoshitoshi, defined the
principles of bijinga as attractive beauty but not indecency, sweetness
is fine but not low class: the person who paints bijinga has to keep
this equilibrium very much in mind.74 Successfully marketed in
70

Shimada Yasuhiro, in Kainosh Tadaoto ten (1997), p. 13; Szostak, pp. 454 ff.
Kainosh Tadaoto ten (1997), p. 132
72
Shimada Yasuhiro, in Kainosh Tadaoto ten (1997), p. 166. In the 1940s Kainosh switched from painting to kabuki theatre and cinema, assisting the film director
Mizoguchi Kenji as art consultant. After 1957 he worked on a comeback as painter.
73
Seki Chiyo, Uemura Shoen. Nihon no Bijutsu 12 (Tokyo: Shibund, 1982), p. 73;
quotation from Uemura Shoen, Seibi sh (1943); cf. Morioka Michiyo, Changing
Images of women: Taish period paintings by Uemura Shoen (1875-1940), Ito Shoha
(1877-1968), and Kajiwara Hisako (1896-1988) (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University
of Washington, 1990).
74
Quoted by Hamanaka Shinji, Bijinga: the portrayal of beauties in modern Japan, in
Hotei Publishing-Abe Publishing, The Female Image: 20th century prints of Japanese beauties (Leiden:, 2000), p.15; cf. Inoue Mariko, Transformation of Female Image in the paintings of Kaburagi Kiyokata (1878-1972) and Kobayashi Kokei (1883-1957) (unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1989).
71

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Figure 9.17. Photograph of a male geisha model.

Figure 9.16. Kainosh Tadaoto, Singing Geisha Girl (Kagi), 1926, detail of 6 panel
screen, 178.5 248.8 cm, colors on silk; private collection.

gender play in modern japanese painting

Figure 9.17. Photograph of a male geisha model.

303

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America from the 1920s until the present, even among Western connoisseurs the Shin-Hanga prints of beautiful women (bijin) are held
to constitute a palliative to the ugliness of the modern world and
to the threat of female sexual liberation, as epitomized by the modangru (moga).75
In fact, contemporary visitors to Kokuten exhibitions, such as the
yga painter Kishida Rysei (1891-1929), did not classify Kansai
painting of women as bijinga, but as a sort of a misunderstood appropriation of fin-de-sicle decadence. In 1921 Kishida denounced the
decadent products of Nihonga painters from Kyoto and Osaka that
flooded the art scene as sick and sweetish images of prostitutes,
maiko, and cats.76 Warning against conflating pornography with the
objectives of true decadent art, Kishida noted that Kansai Nihonga
painters were far from measuring up to Western artists such as
Beardsley and Klimt.77 Yet, in 1927 a somewhat appreciative voice
ventured a comparison between literature and art, calling Kainosh
the Tanizaki Junichir of painting.78 This author might have
sensed a genuine affinity between Yokogushi and literary exemplars of
75
Kendall H. Brown, Taish Chic (Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts and
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), p. 23. Cf. Amy Reigle Newland,
The appreciation of shin hanga in the West: the interwar years, 1915-1940, in Hotei
Publishing-Abe Publishing, The Female Image, pp. 24-30. Significantly, the publisher
Watanabe Shzabur did not only employ bijinga specialists such as It Shinsui
(1898-1972), a disciple of Kaburagi Kiyokata, but also the yga student Hashiguchi
Goy (1881-1921), who in 1915 produced the first shin-hanga of a naked Japanese
woman. See The Female Image, plates 12, 15-16, 20, 21-22, 33, 37, 41, and 60.
76
Kishida referred to works by Kansai painters, in particular the woman painter
Shima Seien (1893-1970), denouncing the women like ghosts (obake no y na onna)
recently on display in the Kokuten and Teiten exhibitions. Kishida Rysei zensh (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979), vol. 2, p. 324. Exhibiting with the Kokuga Society as
guests were the Osaka painter Kitano Tsunetomi (1880-1947) and the Kyto painter
Okamoto Shins (1894-1933). In the 1920s they were classified as non-conformists
for taking prostitutes as models. Kanzaki, Kenichi, Kyto ni okeru Nihonga-shi [History
of Kyto Nihonga] (Kyto: Seiban insatsu-sha, 1929), p. 223.
77
Kishida Rysei, Dekadansu no ksatsu [A Note on decadence] (1921), Kishida Rysei zensh, vol.3, p.160; idem., Bijutsu j no fujin [Women in art], Kishida
Rysei zensh, vol.3, pp. 192-209. Kishida regarded Mona Lisa as the most beautiful
woman in the world. He endowed numerous portraits of his little daughter Reiko
with the enigmatic smile of La Gioconda.
78
Anonymous article in Bi no kuni (1927); quoted in Shimada Yasuhiro, Taishki geijutsu shis no naka no Bakusen [Bakusen and thoughts about art in the
Taish era], in Tky kokuritsu kindai bijitsukan, ed., Tsuchida Bakusen ten [Tsuchida
Bakusen: A Retrospective] (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shimbunsha, 1997), pp. 25-31, with
an English abstract, pp. 32-39.

gender play in modern japanese painting

305

moga such as Naomi, the Westernized heroine of Tanizakis novel

Naomi (Chijin no ai) of 1924.79 It thus appears that the Taish art world
was well aware of the correlation that existed between prostitution,
gender queering, and the phantasm of moga as the proxy of the Western femme fatale.
Conclusion
The project of creating modern national art revealed its reactionary objectives most clearly in the efforts to shape Japanese womanhood as the Other of Western models. As Kan Hgais Hibo Kannon
of 1888 was readily accepted as a masculine symbol of maternal love
and compassion, the mother-child motif proved incompatible with
the patriarchal surveillance of procreation. Similarly, Murakami
Kagaku questioned the erotic power of the Eternal Woman,
declaring his Indian Venus a manifestation of Kannon. Performative
identification with the onnagata, on the other hand, enabled Kainosh
Tadaoto to intertwine homoerotic inversion with the nature of the
modern Japanese femme fatale. Common to all three examples is the
denial of the female principle as the Other of masculinity.
Recent literary studies have argued that, in the colonial context,
cross-dressing may assume a culturally constructive meaning that not
only supports the official suppression of deviant sexualities, but entails
the homoerotic aura of Japans cultural singularity.80 It appears that
79
See Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self. Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 151 ff. on Tanizakis Chijin no Ai (A Fools love), serialized in 1924. Paul McCarthy argues that the antithesis between the Madonna
and the harlot is a basic schema of the novels of Tanizaki Junichir, but lacks the
dichotomist radicalism of 19th century Western literature. Paul McCarthy, The
Madonna and the Harlot: Images of Women in Tanizaki, Japanese Journal of Religious
Studies 9/2-3, (June-September 1982): 235-255.
80
Marc Driscoll, Seeds and (Nest) Eggs of Empire: Sexology Manuals/Manual
Sexology, in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese
History, p. 197. Ma Yuxing, Cross-Dressing and Culture in Modern Japan, Japan
Studies Review, volume 6 (2002): 21-45. Literary examples of cross-dressing are Abe
Jirs hero Santar who claims identity with the onnagata Segawa Kikujir, and the
story Onnagata by Mishima Yukio. See Stephen W. Kohl, Abe Jir no nikki (The
diary of Santar), in Thomas J. Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals
during the Interwar Years, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 7-21;
Mishima Yukio, Onnagata (1966), translated by Donald Keene, in Stephen D.
Miller, ed., Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature. (San Francisco: Gay
Sunshine Press, 1996), pp. 172-189.

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in the visual field, too, gender ambivalence did not indicate a category crisis, but, on the contrary, lent itself to function as an outlet
for lost possibilities of artistic self-expression.81 If we seriously consider the fact that Japanese society faced the trauma of compulsory
heterosexuality during the early Meiji era, and linking that to the
tidal wave of sexual perversion theory that swept through the Taish
art world, one might draw the conclusion that gender ambivalence
was in fact a catalyst that converted artistic self-expression into
national representation. In the particular ideological conjuncture of
Nihonga modernism, elite male practitioners strategically defended
masculine hegemony against the construct of the bijin, and thus subjected the nightmare of the modern girl to sexual perversion theory. As the third gender was brought into the debate about gender
and sexuality, homosexual sublimation provided the intellectual
counterpart to the women-oriented ideal of the romantic bijin. It is
in the market-oriented trans-cultural masquerade of Nihonga modernism that we see this phenomenon most clearly.

81
Majorie Garber argues that gender blending offers a third sex or third term as
a possibility to subvert or at least unveil a failure of definitional distinction of social
categories. After World War II cross-dressing indicates a category crisis induced
by compulsory male-female gender division and functioned universally as a critique
of the dichotomy of Asian and Euro-American culture, high and low art, bourgeois
straight and underground gay art. Majorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and
Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1997 [1992]), pp. 9.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 307

NATIONALLY NAKED? THE FEMALE NUDE IN

JAPANESE OIL PAINTING AND POSTERS (1890s-1920s)
Jaqueline Berndt

Introduction
Nude painting was appropriated by Japanese elites in the late nineteenth century as part of the canon of modern Western knowledge
they were eager to master. The academic genre of the nude appeared
significant to them precisely as it was beginning to lose its significance
for European art; incidentally, this lag put Japanese male artists on
a par with European women artists. What the latter had been denied
by academism, the former were about to discover at a time when
the independence of their country was in danger. Accordingly, the
Japanese study of European art was closely tied to issues of nationality. Until the early twentieth century, Japanese painters as well as
their fellow countrymen positioned oil painting nationally as nonJapanese (in the sense of non-native or non-traditional) and,
paradoxically, at the same time utilized it in the process of creating
a modern national culture. The genre of nude painting attracted
attention mainly in two respects: on the one hand, regarding the
capability of the medium of oil painting to realistically render corporeality and, by means of that, suggest the actual reality of the new
nation; on the other hand, regarding the power of fine art to transform the image of a naked body, that is, nature, into the carrier of
profound meanings, in other words, culture. The depiction of naked
female bodies within the framework of fine art allowed, among other
things, for a visibilization of national accomplishments, especially
with respect to modernization. Assigning such value to the nude,
however, did not necessarily result in a visually discernible nationality.
As I am well aware of the amount of convincing analyses published by art historians about the correlation between academic nude
painting and gender, I will focus less on representations of female
bodies rather than on how female bodies mediated representations
of nationality. Concentrating on Japanese oil paintings and posters

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I will pursue under what circumstances pictorial presentations of

Japanese bodies looked Japanese, and what invited viewers to read
them as particularly Japanese (and not more generally as Asian, for
example). This investigation is underpinned by a cultural as well
aesthetic interest. Without leaning heavily upon the exceptional traditions of European art, the academic nude cannot be appropriated,
a fact which is conversely illuminated by the tendency of all antiEuropean cultural claims to refuse the nude. Yet, as the case of
modern Japan reveals, nationality is not always visible: early nudes
appear in European disguise. Theoretically, this relates to aesthetics
as a practice of mediation, first and foremost, between historic discourses and individual experiences. While such a perspective allows
for a consideration of visualitiesin relation to tactility on the one
hand and symbolization on the otherit also draws attention to
ambiguities, or the co-existence of different positions. Consequently,
the various impacts of nude painting are to be considered as much
in regard to intercultural as intracultural power relations. Representing the nation abroad by means of this genre differed fundamentally
from similar endeavors at home in Japan where (male) elites appreciated nude paintings in secret rooms, while the more ordinary person (male and female alike) enjoyed posters in quotidian interiors.
This essay concentrates on what happened within Japan and, therefore, refrains from highlighting, for example, the so-called Yokohama photographs which were mainly produced for pleasure-seeking
foreigners.
In tune with this anthologys focus on the late-19th to early-20th
century, the two cornerstones of my discussion are a western-style
nude painted in 1893 and two years later the subject of a famous
scandal, as well as a no less famous photographic poster featuring a
semi-nude: Kuroda Seikis (1866-1924) Chsh (Morning Toilet; Figure
10.1) and the Akadama Port Wine Poster by what was then Kotobukiya,
today the Suntory company (1922; fig. 10.12). Representing a case
of implicit Japaneseness, the first serves as the main example in
Section 1, where I foreground how the universalizing which is characteristic of the academic nude correlated with local conditions in
Japan. Remaining in the realm of painting, Section 2 explores the
shift which occurred from the 1910s onwards: from utilizing the
female nude in order to achieve a modern male agency and, as part
of that, equality with European men, to deploying the genre for the

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 309

Figure 10.1. Kuroda Seiki, Chsh (Morning toilet), 1893 (destroyed in June 1945),
178.5 98 cm.

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sake of Japanization. What attracts attention here are, first of all,

bodily proportions. The affirmation of recognizably Japanese nudes
went along with a stylistic interest in Japanese pictorial traditions. In
the 1920/30s, this lead, among other things, to an encounter between
the two branches of native western-style and Japanese-style painting
(yga and nihonga) due to their shared attempt at Japaneseness. Section 3 finally changes the line of vision from painting to advertizing.
Centered around the above-mentioned Akadama Port Wine Poster, it
explicates the importance of national connotations assigned to posters. The Akadama Port Wine Poster also exemplifies a then-new kind
of Japanese advertizing which settled beyond fine art and, thus,
beyond Europe (as most explicitly epitomized by full nudes of Caucasian bodies).
The genre of nude painting can and should be critically discussed
not only in relation to posters but also to modern graphic art (which
occasionally allowed for more unconventional approaches to gender
issues), to photographs (artistic ones like those of Nojima Yasuz as
well as erotic ones)1 and to sculpture (in modern Japan, a genre with
more male nudes than painting). My choice of posters is underpinned
by three facts. First, in modern Japan, paintings and posters were
astonishingly close. Until the time of the Akadama Port Wine Poster,
the task of advertizing was assigned to well-crafted, costly lithographs
which were often framed and hung like paintings; these pictures not
only drew upon the new visual realism but also appropriated motifs
from canonical art works. Second, both western-style paintings and
posters functioned as media of exposure and disclosure, visualizing
gender as well as nationality. This again was, third, tied to attempts
at inciting cultural as well as commercial desires and, by means of
that, to the promotion of Japaneseness for a domestic audience.
1. Invisible Nationality
The academic European nude was characterized by a generalization
of bodies for the sake of visualizing certain ideals and, concordantly,
1
Regarding the first see Philip Charrier, Nojima Yasuzs Primitivist Eye:
Nude and Natural in Early Japanese Art Photography, Japanese Studies, vol. 26,
no. 1 (May 2006): 47-68; for the latter see Shimokawa Kshi, Nihon ero shashinshi,
(Tokyo: Seikysha, 1997).

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 311

by a supra-national, extraterritorial universalization, preferably by
means of reference to classical antiquity. Whenever there were
endeavors to nationalize the nudeas happened in Britain in the
1840-50s in an attempted differentiation from Francethe paintings
became laden with references to national literature. As a result, the
depicted naked bodies were read as particularly national although
they just looked Caucasian (at least, they must have to non-Europeans). In Victorian Britain, the nude was regarded as the standard
against which a nations artistic achievements could be measured, 2
and a few decades later this was the case in Japan as well. This can
be inferred from illustrations which the western-style painter
Fujishima Takeji (1867-1943) created for the magazine Myj in February 1901 (Figure 10.2). Emphasizing that nudes should be considered fine art, he drew a monument and titled it in French Figure
symbolique de lavenir de la nudit au Japon (symbolic figure of the
future of nudity in Japan) but glossed it with the Japanese phrase
Nihon no geijutsu no mirai (the future of art in Japan; emphasis
added).3 While Japanese artists increasingly regarded the nude as
an ideal by which [one] could measure and set a universal even
classless standard for national attainment,4 in the beginning, they
did not consider it as presenting bodies that could be easily identified
as Japanese. The nude was supposed to embody cultural modernityas opposed to traditionalism as well as provincialismand in
tune with that, western forms were favored.
One of the first full nudes rendered in oil by a Japanese was created around 1867.5 Obviously a replica of a European picture, this
2

Alison Smith, Moral Responses to the Victorian Nude, in Onodera Reiko

and The Mainichi Newspapers/Cultural Projects Dept., eds., The Victorian Nude: Morality and Art in 19th-century Britain (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2003), p. 226.
3
See Ueno Kenz, Hakubakai to rataiga, Kindai gasetsu. Meiji bijutsugaku kenkyshi, no. 5 (March 1997): 22. As distinct from this equation of the nude (ratai) with
fine art (geijutsu), Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit claims: Yet, because in Meiji Japan the
nude was seen in contrast to images of Japanese women, the nude was thought to
signify not Art but nature (Lippit, Miya Elise Mizuta, Figures of Beauty: Aesthetics and
the Beautiful Woman in Meiji Japan, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Proquest Information and
Learning, 2002 (Ph.D. Thesis, Yale University, 2001) p.11, footnote no. 16). This is
convincing within the context of her dissertation although partly misleading insofar
as Art is not exclusively defined as a modern institution, which is the case in my
essay.
4
Smith, Moral Response, p. 227.
5
Suiyokuzu (28 28.5 cm.). See Kinoshita Naoyuki, Unmei no sseijishashin
to yga, Geijutsu shinch (March 1994): 31-39.

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Figure 10.2. Fujishima Takeji (1867-1943), Nihon ni okeru geijutsu no mirai, in Myj, no.
11, February 1901.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 313

painting depicts three nymph-like, voluptuous Caucasian women,
half-reclining half-sitting on the shore of a lake and too self-absorbed
with each other as to lift their eyes and address the viewer. Its creator, Shima Kakoku (1827-1870), who worked at the Office for the
Examination of Barbarian Writings under the guidance of oil-painter
Takahashi Yuichi (1828-1894), has not been subject to much art
historical attention, presumably because his picture lacked conventional originality, but more so because it did not achieve any discursive relevance in early modern Japan. In contrast, it was Kuroda
Seikis Chsh (Morning Toilet, 1893)6 that assumed the fame of being
the very first, largely due to its scandalous impact when displayed
at the 4th National Industrial Fair in Kyoto in 1895.
Kuroda had created this painting two years earlier, at the end of
his years of studying in Paris, and had exhibited it under the title Le
Lever successfully at the Salon de Beaux Arts. As art historians have
pointed out, Kuroda was honored by the French jury precisely for
not demonstrating his nationality, in other words, for his accomplishment in adapting an established European genre, the nude, and
rendering a legitimate sujet with a French model, a woman in front
of a mirror watched from behind.7 The depiction of the naked body
is justified not by references to antiquity or orientalism as otherwise
customary for European nudes at that time, but by the allegedly
natural setting whichlast but not least due to the absence of plain
posinggives the impression of a spontaneous and as such quite
modern glimpse into this womans boudoir. In reality, Kuroda was
supported by the Japanese diplomat Nomura Yasushi who placed
not only a room of his residence at Avenue Mareau at the painters
disposal for two months but also paid the model.8
Neither in regard to its subject matter nor its rendering does
Kurodas Morning Toilet look recognizably Japanese, yet, this paintings nationality makes itself felt in an invisible dimension, that is to
say, the specifically Japanese conditions of its creation and reception.

6
(178.5 98 cm.). Purchased by Sumitomo Kichizaemon, the painting become
part of the Sumitomo familys collection together with which it fell victim to the
bombardment of Tokyo on 5 June 1945 and the destruction of the Suma villa.
7
See Tano Yasunori, Chsh shik, Waseda daigaku daigakuin bungaku kenkyka kiy, vol. 42, no. 3 (1997): 149-163.
8
Takumi Hideo, Chsh ratai mondai to sono zengo, in Takashina Shji, ed.,
Zensh: Bijutsu no naka no rafu, vol. 12: Nihon no rafu (Tokyo: Sheisha, 1981), p. 122.

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These have been revealed by Norman Bryson, among others, who

emphasizes the multi-layered gendering characteristic of arts modernization-as-westernization in Japan when he argues: It is through
a focus on the bodies of women. . . that proximity to and intimacy
with the West are evoked.9 Besides the implication that this reference to the West facilitated the preponderance of female over male
nudes in modern Japanese painting, Brysons discussion is noteworthy
for illuminating intercultural relations in light of gender. According
to him, representations of naked female bodies turned into sites of
cultural competition between Japanese artists like Kuroda and his
European colleagues: in front of the nude model and their common
desire for her, the men became equals, irrespective of their cultural
origin, and they were granted further recognition as artists among
other artists if they successfully created nude paintings. But nude
painting empowered men like Kuroda not only abroad. By means
of it, they were also able to display their familiarity with the overwhelming foreign culture at home in Japan. One might assume that
this effect was diminished by the vehement debates nude paintings
evoked as soon as they were exposed to a broader public, yet, this
was not the case. In 1896, just one year after the tumult in Kyoto
where Morning Toilet barely escaped removal from the exhibition
venue, Kuroda was offered a chair at the National Art School.
Through public indignation, the nude drew attention to fine art as
a modern institution, while at the same time it assumed the role of
assuring the artist his social distinctiveness, sometimes compensating
a bohemian identity that could not be maintained in Tokyo as easily
as in Paris.
The case of Kurodas Morning Toilet reveals a complex interrelationship of visible and invisible cultural issues not limited to gender.
Pursuing what tied the nude painting to the modern nation-state, I
shall point out three aspects. First, it is significant that Morning Toilet
obviously served a higher cause than the personal quest for self-expression and artistic originality, that is, the appropriation of status
as a painter, and the elevation of paintings status to fine art as an
9

Bryson, Norman, Westernizing Bodies: Women, Art, and Power in Meiji Yga
in: Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, Norman and Maribeth Graybill, eds., Gender
and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003),
p. 108. See also Kojima Kaoru, Kuroda Seiki ni miru rataiga no juy to sono
eiky, Jissen joshi daigaku bigaku bijutsushigaku kiy, no. 14 (1999): 43-60.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 315

important modern institution. It was precisely the representation of
human bodiesand the nude at its corethat were reputed to be
crucial for western art. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that
some contemporary art historians have paid more respect to the
missionary than the artistic achievements of Kurodas early nude
paintings, especially in comparison to his later semi-nudes which are
often appreciated for their being more intimate and, thus, more
Japanese.10 Such assessments, however, are apparently founded on
stylistic criteria in a narrow sense and risk, for example, underplaying
cultural factors like the above-mentioned bohemian claim of artistic
freedom. In fact, the connection between nude painting and the
nation-state is characterized by an intriguing ambiguity: even an
ultimately academic painter like Kuroda, who served as a civil servant
at the National Art School, vacillated between loyalty to the state
and to individual artistic aspiration, as much as he was torn between
his desire for Europe and his concern for Japan.
Second, from an aesthetic angle which does not confine itself to
stylistic explorations, Kurodas Morning Toilet appears to be Japanese
in a modern way; here, Japaneseness refers to a peculiar way of
incorporating western elements that applies to both represented
matter and representational manner. The first impression of Morning
Toilet may be that it just replaced (traditional) Japanese characteristics with (modern) western ones, in other words, traditions of
alluding to female bodies by a procedure of blatantly exposing them.
In effect, what set paintings like this apart from previous Japanese
art was the novel visuality underlying their realism: they rested upon
a clear division between the viewing subject and the viewed object
which applied to the relation between painter and model as well as
to that between exhibition visitor and art work. Such a separation
proved to be vital in order to prevent nude paintings from referring
to quotidian sexuality, as was easily presumed by Japanese audiences
in regard to their own pictorial traditions.
Before proceeding with my argument, I shall sketch briefly in what
regard the modern nude differed from premodern Japanese pictures
of naked or half-naked bodies. Across all variationsand excluding
religious artundressed bodies in traditional pictures were not ideal10
Takashina Shji, Atarashii bi no hakkenNihon no rafu, in Takashina,
ed., Nihon no rafu, p. 14; and Ueno, Hakubakai, p. 28.

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ized and, accordingly, not laden with national references. Whether

it was medieval scrolls depicting commoners as distinct from aristocrats, or even aristocrats in an awkward situation like a robbery,
whether it was spring pictures (shunga) or pictures of beauties
(bijin-e) both part of ukiyoe, that is, paintings and prints for an urban
populace often aimed at arousing the viewer eroticallyall those
bodies had in common was that they were naked, not that they were
nudes. At present, the traditional pictures of beauties are considered
to come closest to an equivalent to the European nude; however, it
cannot easily be dismissed that Japanese artists refrained from any
idealization other than idolizing, for example, courtesans, and that
the artists showed a much greater interest in clothes and accessories
than in corporeality.
Furthermore, with premodern picturesand among them those
of (often partially) naked peoplethe most important things happened precisely in the invisible space between the viewer and the picture
plane, releasing the image from obligations to accurate objectivization. This relational concept can be found in the supposedly first full
nude painting, Bathing Beauty (Nyyoku bijin zu, 1799; Figure 10.3) by
Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806). Rendered not in oil but mineral
colors on silk, it depicts a naked woman from behind who is just
about to enter a bath tub. Although anatomically incorrect, she gives
the impression of being real; the curve highlighting her bottom and
the slightly colored, although not actually modulated, skin invite the
viewer to get sensually closer. In contrast, modern paintings like
Morning Toilet transferred this tradition into a concept of the picture
as an (allegedly) self-absorbed representation to be appreciated from
a distance. Due to this distance, which favored visuality over tactility
and more, precisely, the admiration of beautifully painted bodies
over the sharing of erotic situationsboth art work and male artist
could liberate themselves from all too carnal, or even pornographic
purposes, and achieve modern autonomy. Many scholars have stressed
that Kurodas efforts at nude-painting were closely tied to his pursuit
of expressive freedom and modern (male) agency.11 Yet, this freedom
must be understood in distinction to traditional interrelationality

11

For example, Kagesato Tetsur, Jinbutsu sekiraga kara rataiga e, in Takashina Shji, ed., Nihon bijutsu zensh, vol. 22: Kindai no bijutsu II: Yga to nihonga (Tokyo:
Kdansha, 1992), p. 179; Takumi, Chsh ratai mondai, p. 124.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 317

Figure 10.3. Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806): Bathing Beauty (Nyyoku bijin zu), 1799;
98.5 48.3 cm. Museum of Art, Atami.

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which was not only a social, but also an aesthetic phenomenon. That
said, one should nonetheless consider the possibility of coming across
ambiguities here, too; after all, Kuroda was familiar with two cultures
and, thus, two ways of seeing.
Before returning to this in the following section, I shall touch upon
the third aspect of the rather invisible nationality of early Japanese
nude paintings, that is, the issue of where nudes were encountered
and how these sites were regulated. To come straight to the point,
pictures of naked women, particularly of such a physical presence
like the one in Morning Toilet, were not to be shown in public, even
if they depicted exotic foreigners. This fact can be deduced from
Georges Bigots (1860-1927) famous caricature of La femme nue
de M. Kuroda (1895; Figure 10.4). It depicts people in front of
Morning Toilet at the Kyoto venue: some stand gaping open-mouthed
in astonishment, and a girl even covers her eyes as if they hurt while
gathering up her kimono and uninhibitedly exposing her legs. Morning Toilet did not create much of a stir when exhibited at the exhibition of the Meiji Art Society (Meiji bijutsu kykai) in Tokyo the previous
year, but in Kyoto it caused a scandal precisely because people who
were not familiar with the new concept of fine art recalled traditional
erotic pictures of beauties after the bath and, consequently, categorized it as a part of daily life (or even pornography). What collided
between Kurodas nude and the exhibition visitors were two ways
of seeing, one that aimed at modernization by westernization, and
another one that rested upon conventional expectations. Vacillating
between European academism and Japanese popular pragmatism,
Morning Toilet distressed the public.
Fernand Ganesco, in whose book Bigots illustration first appeared,
disputed Kurodas capability to skillfully depict a European woman:
... le monstre cr par M. Kuroda, dessin sans habilit, peint avec
une lourdeur et une gaucherie extrmes, a la prtention dtre une
femme europenne nue12 (the monster created by M. Kuroda
designed without ability, painted with extreme clumsiness and awkwardnesshas the pretension of being a naked European woman).
An opponent to the new kind of Japaneseness, the one closely tied
to westernization, he preferred the nakedness on Japanese streets to
12
Fernand Ganesco, Shocking au Japon: de levolution de lart dans lempire du soleil levant, dessins de Georges Bigot, (1895, place of publication not indicated), p. 32.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 319

Figure 10.4. Georges Bigot (1860-1927), La femme nue de M. Kuroda, 1895; in

Fernand Ganesco, Shocking au Japon: de levolution de lart dans lempire du soleil levant: Dessins
de Georges Bigot (np, 1895), p. 33.

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the Salon painting. Mentioned in passing, western-style depictions

of this ordinary, not-yet-idealized nakedness were first exhibited at
Japans 2nd National Industrial Fair in 1881. The term jinbutsu sekiraga (pictures of naked people) that was used to categorize them
in the accompanying catalogue,13 was soon followed by the term
pictures of beauties with naked bodies (ratai bijinga). While the latter
still clung to popular traditions and as such also became utilized
pejoratively by the authorities after 1889, the new academic nude
painting in oil refrained from referring to beauties (bijin) even in
its name: rataiga (nude painting) or rafu ([female] nude).
Remarkably, the unsettled state of the nude reappeared in the
semi-public spaces it was restricted to until the early 1920s. Moralism
and censorship focused on real-looking depictions of naked bodies
in public. Therefore, nude paintings and sculptures were sometimes
partly covered-up, as had happened already with Morning Toilet during the time of the emperors visit to the exhibition in Kyoto, and
at the 6th show of Kurodas Hakubakai Society in 1901, when the
loincloth was for the first time enforced by police intervention (koshimaki jiken). Another option was the reduction of publicity as such:
from 1903 on, fine-art nudes were placed in extra, or secret rooms
of the exhibition venue where only adult men from the better circles
were allowed admission with a special permit.14 As an art genre tied
to national identity, the nude needed police protection, in other
words, regulation of its reality effects.
Not as easily controllable was a different kind of modern public
space, that is, print media which exposed depictions of naked bodies,
especially magazines and lithographs (the latter blooming in the
period between the predominance of traditional wood-cut printing
and the emergence of photo-mechanical printing). The government
started to outlaw nude representations in 1889 on the occasion of
Watanabe Seiteis (1851-1918) title illustration for the novel Lady
Butterfly (Koch) by Yamada Bimy (Figure 10.5). 15 A specialist not in
oil but traditional painting, Watanabe was supposedly the first of his
13

Kagesato, Jinbutsu sekiraga, p. 174.

Still in 1924, Rodins Kiss at the 3rd Exhibition of Contemporary French Art (Dai-sankai furansu gendai bijutsu tenrankai) was put in an extra room together with other art
works; see: Kokumin bijutsu (Special issue: Ratai sakuhin tokubetsushitsu mondai), vol. 1,
no. 7 (July, 1924).
15
Published in the supplement to the magazine Kokumin no tomo, issue no. 37.
14

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Figure 10.5. Watanabe Seitei (1851-1918), title illustration for Lady Butterfly (Koch)
by Yamada Bimy, wood-cut print, 1889; in Kokumin no tomo, supplement to no. 37,
January 1889.

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kind to visit Europe and, at the Paris World Exposition in 1878, was
even awarded a silver medal.16 For Bimya rather provocative
author who wrote in vernacular JapaneseWatanabe depicted the
scene in which the heroine, a court-lady named Butterfly, appears
in front of her rescueralmost performing a contrapostoafter a
futile effort to follow her emperor in death by drowning. Often
regarded as the first full nude in modern Japanese-style painting
(nihonga),17 one should note that, in contrast to Kurodas oil paintings,
this picture entered the public realm as a reproduction. Generally
more focused on an aura of refinement than on strong bones, that
is, bodies, it took Japanese-style painting about two decades longer
than its western-style counterpart to deploy the nude.18 In part, this
can be put down to the fact that the very precedents which academic
nudes require in order to legitimate themselves historically could
only be obtained from European art. Thus, in the early 20th century,
the establishment of a nihonga nude had to put up with suggesting
the westernization of a genre that was initially supposed to dedicate itself to what escaped modernization-as-westernization.
Similar to the above-mentioned example from literature, the distribution of art journals was occasionally prohibited due to objectionable pictures. In 1897, the ban hit Bijutsu hyron (no. 2) because
it contained a reproduction of Kurodas nude triptych Chi Kan J (on
which I will focus in the following section). In 1900, issue no. 8 of
Myj was confiscated because of two drawings by Ichij Narumi
(1876-1900) who had adapted photographs of French nude sculp16
Eiraku Tru, Nihonga ni okeru ratai hygen, in The National Museum of
Art, Osaka, ed., Rataiga 100-nen no ayumi/Modern Nude Paintings 1880-1980 (exh. cat.),
(1983), p. 96.
17
In regard to modern Japanese-style painting, it should be taken into consideration that already in 1842, Watanabe Seiteis teacher Kikuchi Ysai (1788-1878) had
painted Enya Takasada tsuma shutsuyoku zu (Enya Takasadas wife after the bath,
114.4 47.8 cm, colors on silk), a nude which is often categorized as a historical
painting due to its subject matter. This work is counted among Japans modern
art; see, for example, its creators appearance in Kindai nihon bijutsu jiten (1989), p. 117.
However, it was not only painted before the concept of nihonga (as traditionalist modern Japanese painting) emerged, but it probably also escaped broader public attention until Watanabe Seitei painted his version of the same motif in 1881/1882. The
reception process of Kikuchis work in the late 19th century still needs to be explored.
18
The earliest examples are Tsuchida Bakusen Ama (Abalone Divers, 1913) and
Kobayashi Kokei Ideyu (Hot Spring, 1918). See the essay by Doris Croissant in this
volume.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 323

tures. However, the actual thorn in the flesh of the authorities were
nude lithographs, especially those of beauties after bathing (yuagari
bijin), which around 1890 gained popularity as novelty souvenirs and
lucrative commodities (Figure 10.6). Called fake western pictures
(nisemono yga) for their then-spectacular realism otherwise only known
from oil paintings or photos,19 they did not hide their purposethe
pleasure of looking at female bodiesnor did they aspire to the
heights of fine art or the national, although the chance to look
at recognizably Japanese women was without doubt part of the
pleasure.
2. Mediating the Japanization of Oil Painting
In 1935, the Yearbook of Japanese Art (Nihon bijutsu nenkan) found the
Japanization of oil painting accomplished and praised its crystallization in those nudes which expressed a specifically Japanese beauty
in a specifically Japanese style.20 Since that time, Kurodas triptych
Chi Kan J (Wisdom Impression Sentiment, 1897; Figure 10.7) has been
regarded retrospectively as a landmark pointing the way to that very
Japanization.21 It was the first nude in modern Japanese oil painting that both deployed a Japanese model and was painted as well as
exhibited in Japan. Kuroda created the first version in 1897 and
displayed it at the second Hakubakai exhibition the same year; he
finished the reworked version in 1899 and presented it at the World
Exposition in Paris 1900.
The title, as well as the women, however, are mysterious. Kuroda
himself left unexplained whether he was referring to the European
motif of the three Graces, to Christian triptychs, or to Buddhist trinities (sanzon). Art historians suggest that the women embody Wisdom
19
Egakareta Meiji Nippon ten jikk iinkai, ed., Egakareta Meiji NipponSekihanga
[ritogurafu] no jidai, (vol. 1: exh. cat.; vol. 2: kenkyhen/scholarly essays) (Kbe shiritsu
hakubutsukan and Machida shiritsu kokusai hanga bijutsukan, 2002), p. 119; Iwakiri Shinichir, Ukiyoe hanga toshite no sekihangasekihan gakue to nishiki-e no
hikaku kenky, in the same volume, p. 20. I am very grateful to Doris Croissant for
pointing out this publication to me.
20
Tanaka Tatsur, Taish, Shwa zenki no yga to ratai hygen, in The National Museum of Art, Osaka, ed.), Rataiga 100-nen, p. 95.
21
ta Samur, Jky seiki no ratai bijutsu, in ta Samur, ed., Sekai ratai bijutsu zensh, vol. 5 (19-seiki) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1931), p. 14; Tanaka Atsushi, Nihon
no bijutsu 8: Meiji no yga. Kuroda Seiki to Hakubakai (Tokyo: Shibund, 1995), p. 63.

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Figure 10.6. Machida Shinjir, Rafu, ca. 1890, two-color lithograph; in Egakareta Meiji
Nippon ten jikk iinkai, ed., Egakareta Meiji NipponSekihanga (ritogurafu) no jidai, vol. 1,
Kbe shiritsu hakubutsukan and Machida shiritsu kokusai hanga bijutsukan (2002),
p. 169.

Figure 10.7. Kuroda Seiki, Chi Kan J (Wisdom, impression, sentiment), 1897; 180.6 99.8 cm; in Nihon bijutsukan (Tokyo:
Shgakukan 1997), p. 905.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 325

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jaqueline berndt

Impression Sentiment from the right to the left.22 Partly because of its
abstract title, which allegorizes the naked bodies into bearers of concepts, (and which was only used for exhibitions in Japan), the painting does not leave a particularly Japanese impression, although its
stylized golden ground interferes interestingly with the suggested
plasticity of the womens bodies. The first viewers in 1897 took these
bodies as real and, thus, Japanese; one even expressed his sympathy
for Lady Sentiment on the left, who is using her right hand instead
of the conventional fig leafafter all, it would only be a natural
sentiment for a women to cover herself up when exposed at a venue
visited by hundreds of people every day.23 This relates to the issue
of distinguishing between nude and naked which I have already
mentioned in regard to Bigots caricature; below, I shall rather focus
on these womens seemingly western physical proportions.
The womens Caucasian-looking body shape can be traced back
to Kurodas late discovery of his home country. After ten years in
France, he encountered Japan in an exoticizing and idealizing way.
Still seeing things through French eyes and eager to distance himself from native graphics and genre paintings, he latinized the
stature of his Japanese model. According to the critic Kimura
Shhachi, Japanese women at the time were simply inappropriate
for nude paintings anyway, with their short stocky legs, their cats
backs, and huge heads.24 Similarly perpetuating a view formed five
decades earlier,25 in 1965 art historian Nishida Masaaki still considered undressed Japanese women of the 19th century as simply
unsightly: their heads leaned forward because of the heavy traditional hair-knot, the breast was flattened by means of the obi belt,
22

See for example Teshigawara Jun, Rataiga no reimei (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1986).
23
Kuraya Mika, Kunst durch Grenzen: Der Maler Kuroda Seiki und die Aktbilddebatte, in Steffi Richter, ed., JAPAN Lesebuch III: intelli (Tbingen: konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 1998), pp. 62, 64. She quotes from the confiscated issue
no. 2 of Bijutsu hyron (November 1897, Gahsha) which published a fictitious panel
discussion, partly about the 2nd Hakubakai exhibition where Chi Kan J had its premire (pp. 20-35).
24
Kimura Shhachi, Meiji igo no fzoku to taii, in Gendai no me, no. 15, February (1956): 2.
25
Stratzdrawing upon Blzsummarizes the flaws of Japanese bodies as follows: 1. the head is too big, 2. the legs are too short, 3. the hips are too slim. C.H.
Stratz, Die Krperformen in Kunst und Leben der Japaner (Stuttgart: Verlag Ferdinand
Enke, 1904), p. 61.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 327

and they walked pigeon-toed in their geta sandals in order to avoid
flapping their kimono seams and unveiling their legs.26 Such bodies
populated Japanese daily life; at least until the 1930s, young ladies
were expected to acquire a shape which fit the kimono. In contrast,
oil-painting did not call for this kind of body, at least not in the
beginning.
In early modern Japan, oil painting was found fascinating on
account of its potential for visualization. However, realistic techniques were not necessarily deployed for reportage-like depictions of
everyday life. As can be inferred from Kurodas nudes, around 1900,
not realist, but idealist images were aspired to. Concordantly, oil
painting appeared as a window to a not-yet-real world, expressing
the real, or actual freight of a utopian longing. The range of this
rather abstract desire (which was, among other things, a desire for
a modern and male agency) distinguished Kurodas paintings from
former attempts at realism as naturalism in Japan. These had
remained in the realm of the particular and the sensualwhether
artistic explorations of naturalism in the sense of documentation, for
example approaching anatomic realism,27 or naturalistic representations serving as spectacle at temple fairs (misemono). Both were not
only loyal to Japanese body shapes but also humorous and, thus, full
of understanding for human frailties which obviously needed to be
discarded later for the sake of higher meanings. An intriguing
example of amusing naked bodies were the so-called living dolls
(iki-ningy) of the early 1850s (Figure 10.8). Although they might better be discussed in relation to nude sculpture than painting, I would
just like to mention that their creators, tooif they presented them
stripped of clothing at allpreferred undressed foreigners, in order
to reassure themselves and their customers of what was native.28 Yet,

26
Nishida Masaaki, Nihonjin no jintai to rataiga, in Gendai no me, no. 126
(Tokush: rataiga) (May 1965): 6.
27
See for example the astonishing sketches by Maruyama kyo, Jinbutsu seisha
shon (Exact depictions of human bodies), 2 scrolls, 31.4 992 cm and 31. 4 1079
cm, ink on Japanese paper with light coloration, ca. 1770.
28
According to Kinoshita Naoyuki, Iki-ningy no misemono to tenrankai ni
tsuite, in Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, ed., Iki-ningy to Matsumoto
Kisabur (exh. cat.), (Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto and Osaka History
Museum, 2004), pp. 104-108. The photographs in the catalogue as well as Kinoshitas explanations suggest that most of these figures invited laughter.

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Figure 10.8. Nezumiya Denkichi, living doll (iki-ningy) of a peasant woman, 150 54
34 cm, late 19th century, Smithsonian Institution; in Contemporary Art Museum,
Kumamoto, ed., Iki-ningy to Matsumoto Kisabur (Contemporary Art Museum,
Kumamoto and saka History Museum, 2004), p. 65.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 329

as long as this was accompanied by laughter it implied a fundamental
doubt about any serious identity claims.
In Wisdom Impression Sentiment, Kuroda presents, in all seriousness,
Japanese bodies through a western filter. He suggests corporeality
but at the same time withdraws its specifity by removing local markers like body shape or clothing, accessories or tangible spaces. This
differs from earlier pictorial representations of Japanese bodies, for
example by Wilhelm Heine (1827-1885; Figure 10.9) or Goseda
Yoshimatsu (1855-1915) which appear to be dominated by the very
medium they are deploying to such an extent that they depicted
Japanese bodies only in Caucasian proportions. By way of comparison, Wisdom Impression Sentiment is not solely characterized by a western gaze directed onto a Japanese womans body but rather by two
ways of seeing which the interculturally experienced painter manages
to balance: a distanced appreciation of idealized, beautiful bodies,
and a suggested experience of physical presence. As if implying that
the national appropriation of the nude could only be achieved by its
idealization, Kurodas work illuminates the domestication of the
astonishing corporeality oil painting is capable of, in the twofold
sense of the word: it was Japanized and at the same time tamed in
order to distinguish it from a different kind of Japanization, that of
the above-mentioned lithographs. It goes without saying that this
domestication included efforts to avoid equivocation. When Wisdom
Impression Sentiment was about to be sent to Paris in 1900, debates
evolved about whether it would be an appropriate representative of
the Japanese nation at the World Exposition, or, on the contrary,
whether it matched Paris better than Tokyo.29 Finally, the Japanese
government exhibited it under the simple title Etudes de femmes. The
French, though, thought it to be Japans best artistic contribution to
the exposition and awarded it a silver medal.30
Idealizing native women through westernization in academic oil
painting decreased after 1910. In turn, artists began to discover a
specifically national beauty in rusticand, as such, more rural than

29

Ueno, Hakubakai, p. 17.

Tokyo National Museum et.al., eds., Seiki no saiten: Bankoku hakurankai no bijutsu/
Arts of East and West from World Expositions 1855-1900: Paris, Vienna and Chicago (exh.
cat.) (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 2004), p. 229.
30

Figure 10.9. Wilhelm Heine (1827-1885), Ein ffentliches Badehaus in Simoda [sic], in Wilhelm Heine: Reise um
die Erde nach Japan: an Bord der Expeditions-Escadre unter Commodore M. C. Perry in den Jahren 1853, 1854 und 1855,
unternommen im Auftrage der Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten; mit fnf vom Verfasser nach der Natur aufgenommenen Ansichten in
Tondruck, ausgefhrt in Holzschnitt von Eduard Kretzschmar, vol. 2, (Leipzig: H. Costenoble 1856), p. 34.

330
jaqueline berndt

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 331

urbannudes.31 Yorozu Tetsugor (1885-1927) was one of the first
to do so (Figure 10.10). Moreover, the new subject matter corresponded with a novel attitude: Yorozu painted consequently out of
personal necessity rather than devotion to ideals, and he treated his
models not as mere objects at the painters disposal but as partners
who, thus, also retained recognizably Japanese proportions. 32 Influenced by European modernism, this Japanization of the nude became
an increasingly stylistic issue as well. In 1935, modernist Imaizumi
Atsuolater the first chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art
Tokyopointed to the importance not of traditional motifs but of
formal traditional effects (like those generated by ink on paper) emulated in Western matire.33 This is precisely what was pursued by
western-style painters such as Umehara Ryzabur (1888-1986).
Turning back to old Japanese art after having gone through its modern discourse and institution, the Japaneseness they foregrounded
involved a modern approach towards planarity and the layered construction of pictorial space, formal simplification and decorative stylization, brushwork and colorism. However, this formalization of
visible nationality did not necessarily prevent such artistswho were
pursuing an apparently autonomous, non-political artfrom providing nationalist content under the conditions of imperialism and militarism. The discernible bodily Japaneseness of their nudes played a
prominent role in this regard.34
The first historical summary of the reception of the nude in Japan
appeared in 1931 when the six-volume Complete Series of World Nude
31
This also implies social status, as Charriers article on Nojima suggests (Primitivist Eye, p. 50): whereas Kurodas idealized women seem classless, Yorozus seem
to be of lower origin.
32
See Mizusawa Tsutomu, The Artists Start to Dance. The Changing Image of
the Body in Art of the Taish Period, in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being
Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2000), pp. 14-24.
33
In Atorie (Special Issue: Yga ni okeru nihonteki keik), no. 3 & 4, 1935, according
to Asano Tru, Nihonteki abura-e no keisei, in Takashina Shji, ed., Nihon bijutsu
zensh, vol. 23: Kindai no bijutsu III: modanizumu to dent (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1992), p.
152.
34
Still today, the achievement of a truly Japanese oil painting is tied to the
Japanese bodies in paintings by Maeda Kanji (1896-1930) and Koide Narashige
(1887-1931) around 1930, for example by Tky geijutsu daigaku daigaku bijutsukan et. al., eds., Saik: kindai nihon no kaigabiishiki no keisei to tenkai (Remaking Modernism in Japan 1900-2000: exh. cat.) (Tky geijutsu daigaku bijutsukan, Tky-to
gendai bijutsukan, Saison gendai bijutsukan, 2004), p. 107.

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Figure 10.10. Yorozu Tetsugor (1885-1927), Higasa no rafu (Female nude with sun
parasol), 1913, oil on canvas, 80.5 53 cm. Museum of Modern Art Kanagawa.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 333

Painting35 was published in Tokyo. The fifth volume, dedicated to the
19th century, contained seven art works by Japanese out of a total
of 78. Among these were Kurodas Morning Toilet as well as Wisdom
Impression Sentiment but also pictures by Kikuchi Ysai and Katsushika
Hokusai (1760-1849) as examples of the late Edo era. In Volume 6
on contemporary art, the Japanese share increased to 24 out of 78
art works and also included some sculptures. Besides the fact that all
chosen artists were male, the two volumes had in common a prevailing focus on European art: Japanese art was compared to France,
Germany and Italy, but other Asian or non-European cultures did
not count, proving once more that the nude was defined as a genre
of European art. Additional evidence was provided by the fact that
only one traditional-style painting was featured among the Japanese
examples. Symptomatically, its creator, Kawabata Ryshi (18851966), was an artist first educated in western-style painting la
Kuroda;36 only later, after a visit to Boston and the Japanese collection in its art museum, did he turn to traditionalism.
Apart from Kawabata, the nude series neglected nihonga painters,
even the famous Tsuchida Bakusen (1887-1936), who, according to
Doris Croissant, was keeping with the tendency to make femininity into the quintessence of Japanese aesthetics as opposed to the
masculinity of Western civilization.37 This femininity hints at the
other side of modernization-as-westernization; however, as a mere
counterpart it remains tied to what it is opposing. Investigating the
relations of painting to nationality and nationalism requires considering not only the dimension of gendering as such, but also aspects
such as idealizing and prioritizing visuality. From this perspective
Tsuchidas semi-nudes appear to be of an unassuming presence: they
are not driven by an abstract, yet explicit desire like Kurodas western-style nudes, and they do not generate an overwhelmingly sensual
impact either. The latter, often erotic if not pornographic side was
widely domesticated in modern Japan, especially in the generic pic35
ta Samur, ed., Sekai ratai bijutsu zensh, supervised by Okada Sabursuke und
Fujishima Takeji, 6 vols (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1931).
36
Painting in the anthology Shinju (Pearls), 1931. Kawabata entered Kurodas
Hakubakai Institute (Hakubakai kenkysho) in 1904; in 1907, one of his oil-paintings
was chosen for the 1st Salon of the Ministry of Culture (Bunten).
37
Doris Croissant, Icons of Femininity: Japanese National Painting and the
Paradox of Modernity, in Mostow et. al., eds., Gender and Power, p. 137. See also
Doris Croissants essay in this volume.

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tures of beauties (bijinga); yet, it lived on, for example, in Kainosh

Tadaotos (1894-1978) Japanese-style nude paintings (Figure 10.11).
By referring to them I do not intend to open a discussion of eroticism
or pornography here, although the fact that they were criticized as
decadent and dirty (kitanai) may sooner or later lead there. I find
it more intriguing that an assessment as dirty might have arisen
partly from their emphasis on skin. Similar to the above-mentioned
living dolls (iki-ningy) which were admired for their apparently
smooth skinand in contrast to the beautiful look38 of a modern full
nude Kainoshs nudes hold the sense of tactility in high esteem.39
Refusing the prioritization of a highly symbolic visuality over sensual
nearness incorporates a critical potential to escape nationalism, a
potential which, admittedly, may materialize itself in pornographic
forms, especially in Japan. Whereas Kainoshs nudes suggest such
a potential, the mainstream of the academic nude in Japan reveals
what it takes to promote the nation: an idealization-as-universalization which gives priority to (often verbalizable) symbols undervaluing
the sensual and accidental; a support by traditions even if those are
derived from a foreign canon; and, of course, public attention.
3. Advertizing Nationally
Attempts at deploying (at least partially) naked bodies of women for
national promotion were not limited to fine art. One of the most
astonishing examples in the history of Japanese advertizing is
undoubtedly the Akadama Port Wine Poster (1922; Figure 10.12) which
was even awarded a First Prize at the Werbe-Kunst-Schau Exposi38

As demonstrated above, for Japanese painters around 1900, beauty was

characterized by a prioritizing of the visual (that is, the look) over the haptic (that is,
the touch), in other words, a certain distance which allowed getting close to ideals.
39
Fujita Tsuguharus (1886-1968) nudes put also emphasis on the depicted womens skin and, at the same time, on the Japanized way of their rendering (the praised
milk-white resulting from a specific combination of traditional and European coloring); they are even admired for their equation of translucent female skin and the
tactility of the painted surface (see Kuraya Mika, Slashing the Skin: Two Motifs of
Tsuguharu Lonard Foujita, in Ozaki Masaaki, Kuraya Mika et.al., eds., Tanj
120nen Fujita Tsuguharu ten/Lonard Fujita (exh. cat.) (Tokyo: The National Museum of
Modern Art, Tokyo 2006), Engl. supplement, pp. 6-10. However, they differ from
Kainoshs nudes not only in regard to explicit eroticism, but also insofar as they
require symbolic operations in order to approach the skins haptic quality, for example, a detour via other pictorial motifs such as cats and clothes.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 335

Figure 10.11. Kainosh Tadaoto (1894-1978), Rafu, 1925; colors on silk, 65 38.6 cm;
The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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Figure 10.12. Inoue Mokuda and Kataoka Toshir, Akadama Port Wine Poster (1922),
HB process offset print, 82 58 cm; courtesy of Suntory Ltd. A color plate of this
illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 337

tion Nuremberg in 1922. Made for the liquor company Kotobukiya
(today, Suntory), its creation is usually credited to Kataoka Toshir
(1882-1945) and Inoue Mokuda (or, Teiz; 1891-1940).40 The former
had been the head of Kotobukiyas PR department for three years
when he acted as artistic director for the Akadama Port Wine Poster;
the latterinitially a student with western-style artist Asai Ch
(1856-1907) but in the prime of his life dedicated to Japanese-style
paintingwas Kotobukiyas first chief designer. Their Akadama Port
Wine Poster is usually regarded as conventional in terms of its motif
of a beauty (bijin), but innovative in terms of its technical premises,
that is, a HB process offset print on paper, deploying a monochrome
photograph of a seemingly half-naked lady41 and centering on a strikingly red glass of wine. I shall focus on the posters clearly Japanese
appearance here.
The poster features a lady who must, in her time, have been
identified as Japanese, at least in Japan and even by those who did
not recognize Matsushima Emiko, singer of the Akadama Revue. In
addition to her face and hairstyle, the fact that she does not appear
in full-body length further underlines the impression of her being
Japanese. In Japan, the shape of the shoulders, the nape of the neck
and the arms were traditionally regarded the real national mark of
beauty, as Stratz observes, and he even recommends picturing only
the upper body part of Japanese women in order to avoid their beauty
being spoiled by the sight of their short legs and thick ankles. 42 But
the attractive woman on the poster not only looks Japanese, she also
promotes a particularly Japanese sort of alcohol: Akadama Port Wine
was the first western liquor which Japanese customers found deliciousprecisely because it was not authentic. When Torii Shinjir
(1879-1961), the company founder, began to sell port wine in Osaka
around 1907, he soon realized that for native customers it needed
to be sweeter and more beautifully colored than the imports from

40
See James Fraser, Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, Japanese Modern. Graphic Design Between the Wars (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996).
41
Whether she actually wears a dark evening dressas is stated by Uekawa
Yoshimi (Great People of Osaka: Shinjiro Torii, the Founder of SUNTORY
Single-minded devotion to producing liquor, http://www.ibo.or.jp/e/2004_2/01_
4/1_4.html; last access 2006/03/31), remains unclear. Concerning the photographer, there are no records of an individual, only of the Kawaguchi Photo Studio.
42
Stratz, Kperformen, pp. 48-51.

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Spain and Portugal; consequently, he developed his own blend. 43

Being likewise aware of the fact that the demand for such a product
could not be reckoned with but had first to be generated, he placed
ads in local newspapers as early as 1909 and facilitated the promotion of a whole liquor culture, with the emphasis on spirits as
pleasurable, not just medicinal, at its core. The red-ball mark (akadama) which made Toriis port wine famous, played a crucial role.
It goes without saying that it stood in for the sun and, moreover, the
empire of the rising sun. Even the company name Suntory, which
was introduced in 1963, leads back to this brand insofar as it consists
of the English word sun and the founders name spelled tory.
In several respects, the Akadama Port Wine Poster resembles Kurodas
oil-painting Chi Kan J (Wisdom Impression Sentiment): it impresses with
bodily presence and realistic effect while opening a window into
another world. Furthermore, both promote: the artistic painting
boosts a purely aesthetic art as part of a modern national culture;
the commercial poster recommends the delicious and nutritious
grape-wine (bimi jiy budsh)to quote the printed taglinevisually
as a national drink. Even how they effect this promotion is similar:
both offer female bodies to covetous gazes and at the same time
withdraw these bodies from complete possession. The poster, however,
does this for commercial rather than political reasons; it creates new
needs while at the same time denying final gratification in order to
keep consumption going.
To art historian John Clark, the Akadama Port Wine Poster is symptomatic of the new tendency of addressing consumers as individuals:
In the 1920s this consciousness of the consuming group is reversed
toward a privatized erotic pleasure, one which mimics the self-conscious
use of the most advanced reprographic technology then available in
photogravure.44 What is called group here can, with respect to
the historical transformation posters underwent, be traced back to
how they had been used and, accordingly, composed. Although named

43
After the so-called Madrid Treaty, which was signed in 1973, Suntory changed
the name to Akadama Sweet Wine in order to meet the requirements of distinguishing its product from authentic sorts of port.
44
Clark, John, Indices of Modernity. Changes in Popular Reprographic Representation, in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark, John, eds., Being Modern in Japan:
Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
2000), p. 30.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 339

with the English loanword poster, they did not really function as
such until around 1920. Adorning the walls of traditional guesthouses,
barber shops, public baths, retail shops and, especially important,
the waiting rooms of the National Railway stations, these pictures
stayed with their viewers for a while: like calendars, they were usually
seen repeatedly and slowly. After all, they were carefully crafted
lithographs with more pictorial details to discover than later simplified and therefore eye-catching designs. Well-known in this regard
are the posters for the Mitsukoshi department store created after
1907 by artists like Hashiguchi Goy (1880-1921) or Okada Sabursuke (1869-1939). Yet, since their ladies did not get undressed, another
and even earlier example shall be highlighted here: the poster for
Tengu Cigarettes (Tengu tabako, 1900; Figure 10.13).
Like the Akadama Port Wine, cigarettes of the Tengu brand were
a domestic product made from Japanese material, in this case tobacco.
Their supplier was the Iwaya Shkai company in Tokyo which had
been in the business since 1884. When facing strong competition by
the Murai Brothers from Kyoto, who relied on imports from America,
Iwaya developed a marketing campaign around the traditional tengu
goblin; a whole range of cigarette sorts emerged under this name,
and attractive posters were commissioned, too.45 The example here
exhibits a naked, dark-haired lady who neither looks clearly Caucasian
nor Asian. This seemingly westernized Japanese beauty is accompanied by a rather small tengu who hangs on the upper-left corner of
her mirror. Apart from being regarded as native, the goblin has two
characteristics: a long nose and a red face (in tune with the latter,
many Iwaya Shkai shops were given a red interior design). In this
poster, the tengus nose does not necessarily have to be related to
phallic empowerment through smoking; it points to the pleasant smell
of cigarettes from local tobacco as well since the tengu is, after all,
known for his extraordinary olfactory abilities. His red face again
suggests a reference to both Japanese ogres (oni), and westerners, who
were widely known as red-faces and long-noses. In addition, the
tengu invades a canonical European painting, taking the place of cupid
from Peter Paul Rubens Venus at a Mirror (ca. 1615). In the poster,
45
Sugita Shinju, Sekihanga ni okeru shgy bijutsu no hatten, in Egakareta
Meiji Nippon-ten jikk iinkai, ed., Egakareta Meiji NipponSekihanga [ritogurafu] no jidai,
vol. 2 (Kbe shiritsu hakubutsukan and Machida shiritsu kokusai hanga bijutsukan,
2002), pp. 65-67.

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Figure 10.13. Tengu tabako Poster, Iwaya shkai, 1900; multi-colour lithography,
56.6 43.5 cm; in Egakareta Meiji Nippon, vol. 1, p. 235. A color plate of this illustration
can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 341

the tengu is so riveted by Venus beauty that he lets the cigarettes slip
out of his hand. Her gaze, however, addresses the viewer.
The Akadama Port Wine Poster presents a similar lady, yet, in a way
quite different from its predecessor. First, it is situated beyond the
realm of fine art, that is, outside of its spaces, without representational
reference to a certain canon andunlike the early Mitsukoshi posterswithout claims to being a painting. In contrast, the Tengu Tobacco
Poster calls upon art to stand in metonymously for Europe and
accordingly gives the womans body a Caucasian shape. Second, the
Akadama Port Wine Poster does not elevate a local product through
westernization, but Japanizes a European drink, one of those objects
brought by foreign progress and now made Japanese by advertisement.46
In the early 20th century, womens bodies, dressed or undressed,
served mainly two purposes in advertizing: luxury goods, and art
exhibitions (which, as mentioned in passing, raises the question
whether art and its symbol, the nude, were accepted in the 1920s
mainly as one of a number of luxury goods). Outside the context of
fine art, womens bodies were deployed even for products they had
not the slightest logical relation to, just because they ensured adult
attention. Among the things they promoted were soap and medicine,
but also cigarettes and alcohol, the latter being commodities that
symbolize the basic principles of capitalist consumerism as they stir
desire (and, occasionally, cause addiction). Investing these things with
sweetness, seduction, social status, pureness and even timelessness,
the represented womenwhether traditional beauties (bijin) or European angelsalluded to the academic nude. In modern Japan, they
resembled nude paintings furthermore with respect to their functioning as mediators between the familiar and the new. What Norman
Bryson asserts about early Japanese nude paintings seems to apply
to posters, too: By possessing what Western men desired, they [Japanese men] could enter into the orbit of the West through identification.47
However, in the Akadama Port Wine Poster, the orbit of the West
can be entered by means of a half-naked Japanese woman who opens
her mouth quite lasciviously, shows her teeth in a not very Japanese
46
47

Clark, Indices of Modernity, p. 39

Bryson, Westernizing Bodies, p. 98.

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manner and, equally uninhibitedly, returns the viewers gaze. This

raises the question of what kind of masculinity could have been at
play in front of her. On closer inspection, the viewer does not necessarily have to objectify this woman; one is equally offered the option
of identifying with her and her agency. This woman is capable of
literally swallowing the Other, as the composition suggests; the viewer
connects sensually, for example, by anticipating a pleasant warm
feeling in his or her belly. The assumption that poster beauties such
as this one addressed themselves first and foremost to male customers
is further undermined by the womans smile: an open and self-confident smile far away from both the serious ladies in Chi Kan J
(Wisdom Impression Sentiment) and the allegedly false or servile smile
as a clich-signifier of Japaneseness. If this poster can be linked to
nationalism at all, then it must be to a commercial one promoting
consumerism as the Japanese citizens duty no. 1, which in 1922 was
hardly to be imagined.
The Akadama Port Wine Poster stays ambiguous in regard to the
gender of its viewers and potential customers. But there were seminude posters advertizing clearly female commodities, too. For the
spring exposition held by the Takashimaya department store together
with the Asahi Newspaper in March 1929 called Osaka in Kimono
(Kimono no saka), Takashimaya commissioned a modern beauty
from Japanese-style painter Kitano Tsunetomi (1880-1947, Figure
10.14).48 The Japanese lady in the picture, who reveals her left shoulder down to the slightly pink nipple of her left breast, addressed, in
her time, not male but female customers, as did the accompanying
poem by female writer Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) which appears on
the left side of the final poster version. Speaking of the moment when
one is about to put on the likeness of a fragrant modern poem,49
it points to the modernity of this semi-nude in traditional attire. Thus,
the poem reinforces the painters attempt at modernizing the traditional beauty genre via references to nude painting. Similar to the
Akadama Port Wine Poster, Japaneseness is emphasized, and it is
epitomized by a self-confident woman who freely intertwines tradition with modernity. The astonishing sensuality prevalent in both
48
Tokyo Station Gallery et.al., eds., Kitano Tsunetomi-ten (exh. cat.) (Tokyo Station
Gallery, Ishikawa kenritsu bijutsukan, Shiga kenritsu kindai bijutsukan, 2003).
49
The poem reads, Kakuwashiki kindai no uta no omokage o yosoi sen to meib no tame (I
shall put on the likeness of a fragrant modern poem, to appear bright).

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 343

Figure 10.14. Takashimayas poster promoting the exposition Kimono no saka 1929,
deploying the original nihonga painting by Kitano Tsunetomi, Fujin, 1929; colors on
silk, 105.8 78.5 cm; courtesy of Takashimaya Historical Museum. A color plate of
this illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

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posters may be narrowed down to the fact that they originated in

Osaka,50 but in view of the issues discussed above they also suggest
a national self-image, even though slightly different from that of the
artistic nudes, especially those created in the capital.
Concluding Remarks
In modern Japan the nude functioned as a prominent mediator
between the familiar and the new. As such it may attract critical
attention first and foremost in regard to the history of cultural
exchange. However, the nude was not a mere mirror of westernizing and nativizing; it became an important cultural site for the
formation of national identity precisely as a genre of fine art. Acknowledging the latter implies a consideration of both contexts and texts,
in other words, art institutions and discourses as much as matters
and manners of pictorial representation. Accordingly my discussion
of nude paintings and posters in the sections above focused mainly
on three aspects: the issue of in/visible Japaneseness as such, the
more specific question of what bodies were to represent Japaneseness, and Japaneseness ascribed to certain ways of seeing and
their pictorial manifestation. The general concern underlying my
examination is whether pictures can be critical, or what kind of
pictures are capable of undermining ideological, in our case, nationalist, closure. Forms of visual art which favor relationality, sensual
nearness, and particularity (occasionally including pornographic pictures) provide such critical potential, at least, insofar as they have to
put up with a powerful counterpart, the hegemonic notion of fine or
beautiful art which emphasizes clear divisions between viewing
subject and viewed object, and the distanced appreciation of idealized, autonomous images by means of a symbol-seeking visuality.
Following the European model, the nude as a crystallization of the
latter was implanted in modern Japan. To what extent it replaced
the previously dominant concept of the naked in those days, and
whether it has taken turns with a post-modern nakedness today,
remains to be explored. However, since the beginning of the 21st
century, an aesthetically accentuated Japaneseness, reminiscent of
50
Only after the Great Kant Earthquake in 1923 did Torii, the maker of Akadama Port Wine, expand to the Japanese capital.

the female nude in japanese oil painting and posters 345

the modern nudes connotations, has been seeing a revival; now,
Japanese state institutions respond to globalization by means of a
national branding vacillating between a cool and a beautiful
Japan. Under such conditions the historical issue of the modern nude
gains a topicality beyond debates of gender or pornography: its reveals
the persistence of clinging to western models especially among those
who claim to dismiss them, with respect to promotions of national
culture as well as to conservative notions of art.

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the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

347

THE ALLURE OF A WOMAN IN CHINESE DRESS:

REPRESENTATION OF THE OTHER
IN IMPERIAL JAPAN
Ikeda Shinobu

During the 1920s and the 1930s, many Japanese artists painted portraits of Japanese women wearing what was popularly known at the
time as shinafuku (Chinese dress).1 This chapter focuses on how
different artists handled their subject matter and on what this treatment says about the relationship between gender, modernism, and
imperialism in Japan during the interwar period. More specifically,
this paper examines the issue of how China was portrayed as the
Other by way of an elaborate, hybrid figure of women in the visual
and literary culture of Japan during this time. As an object of visual
representation, the female figure functioned as the Other that
helped male artists to construct their own subjectivity. The gaze of
the modern masculine subject was projected onto the colonial and
sexual Other. In other words, the image of China as the Other
was often conflated with the image of a Japanese woman in Chinese
dress.
Japan was a growing empire during the 1920s and the 1930s, and
Sino-Japanese relations at the time were largely dictated by Japans
1

(Place of publication in the footnotes is Tokyo, unless otherwise noted.)

The term shinafuku, meaning the dress of China, was the name by which this
fashion was known in Japan at the time. The term is used here only in so far as to
state the historical fact, although the term Chinese dress is also used in the sense
of being a representative dress of modern China. In recent years, researches have
been focusing on issues such as the relation between the rise of ethno-national sentiment and the modernization/Westernization of costume in modern China, and its
connection with pervasive commercialism; see, for example, Dorothy Ko, Jazzing
into Modernity: High Heels, Platforms, and Lotus Shoes, in Valerie Steele and
John S. Major, eds., China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996), pp. 141-153; Ellen Johnston Laing, Visual Evidence for the Evolution of
Politically Correct Dress for Women in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 70-114. It may be surmised that the desire to both oppose as
well as assimilate West European culture evident in various styles was coupled with
power relations within Asia. There is a need for more inter-disciplinary research in
this area.

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ikeda shinobu

imperialistic ambitions. Japan saw the chaos following the fall of the
Qing dynasty in 1911 as a prime opportunity to increase its influence
in China. In 1915, during the First World War, Japan seized the
port city of Qingdao in eastern China, and put unreasonable demands
on the Chinese government the following year. This met with fierce
resistance from the Chinese side. From the 1930s to the end of the
Second World War, the Japanese invasion of China became increasingly aggressive. In 1931, Japan colonized northeastern China and
established the puppet-state Manchukuo in 1932. During the Pacific
War, Japan justified its military aggression in continental Asia under
the garb of the ideology of The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity
Sphere, stating that it intended to liberate continental Asia from
the shackles of Western subjugation and colonialism.
In the cultural sphere, on the other hand, the 1920s and the 1930s
have been characterized as an era of great artistic freedom and innovation in Japan and hitherto scholarship has emphasized the art of
this period as being of an unconventional, autonomous, and rather
revolutionary, avant-garde character. Many artists and writers
searched for novel subject matter and often took fancy to the image
of the Other, be it woman, colonial subjects, or the proletariat.
Some also experimented with what may be called a cross-fertilization of new styles and methods of expression, studying various artforms of Japan, Europe, and China. Many scholars continue to
interpret this peculiar cross-fertilization of art across geographical
space and time as a cross-border fusion representing the quintessential characteristics of art of the period under the rubric of what
is termed as Japanese modernism.
But the representation of the Other by Japanese males as evident
in the portrayal of women in Chinese dress during this period was
not so simple. China, as a rather difficult, colonial Other, alternated
with the image of yet another Other, namely woman, serving
as an object of control for the Japanese male. Thus the subject of a
woman in Chinese dress, portrayed as being both appealing and
seductive, functioned as a male-centered construct driving another
project of Japanese imperialism. It is in the process of the construction of a national identity of Imperial Japan as a possible bulwark
against the West that the subject of a woman in Chinese dress was
elaborated.
Many Japanese journalists, novelists, and intellectuals who traveled
to China wrote about Chinese women of different social classes.

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

349

These texts were often illustrated with photographs and pictures as

we shall see below. It is significant to note that it is from the mid1920s that Japanese women began to wear Chinese dress, and it
becoming an acceptable fashion statement in the Japanese imperial
capital. A woman who wore such a garment was called a modangru (moga, for short) or Modern Girl and was the target of
both criticism and glorification. The latter was based on the expression of freedom unfettered by social custom, while the former was
vented for their being frivolous and immorally sexual.
Ty-buri (In the Oriental Manner) (Figure 11.1), a well-known oil
painting by Fujishima Takeji (1867-1943), was displayed at the Fifth
Annual Exhibition of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in 1923. It
is acclaimed as one of Fujishimas most important works ever since
he played an instrumental role in establishing the genre of Westernstyle painting in modern Japan. Fujishima taught oil painting at the
Tokyo School of Fine Arts and regularly showed his works at the
annual art exhibits organized by the government. In the large retrospective exhibition of Fujishimas oeuvre held at the Bridgestone
Museum of Art in 2002, the title Ty-buri, which literally means in
the manner of the Orient, was translated into English as Orientalism, but this does not convey the quite right nuance, either. The
painting is a portrait of a Japanese woman wearing what was known
as shinafuku (Chinese dressactually a Manchu costume, a point
to be taken up below). This work is an early example of the modern
genre of Japanese woman in Chinese dress. The model is set in
front of what appears to be some kind of Chinese calligraphy. The
painter shows her face in profile, which is rather unusual in modern
portraiture.
For viewers familiar with early Renaissance painting, the composition of Fujishimas picture and the detailed treatment of the subject,
including her clothes and accessories, recall famous fifteenth-century
Italian works such as Portrait of Battista Sforza, the Duchess of Urbino by
Piero della Francesca. Fujishima is known to have made a copy of
Pisanellos Portrait of Ginevra dEste (now in the Louvre) (Figure 11.2)
and, as is evident in a photograph taken around 1931, it seems to
have hung in his atelier (Figure 11.3).2 Such a historical connection
is also evident in Hkei (Profile of a Woman holding an Orchid), a similar
2

Both the photograph of the copy, Copy after Pisanellos Portrait of Ginevra
dEste, and that of Fujishima in his atelier, are reprinted in the catalogue Fujishima

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ikeda shinobu

Figure 11.1. Fujishima Takeji, Ty-buri (In the Oriental Manner), 1923.

work by Fujishima of 1926 (Figure 11.4). He produced similar versions on the same subject during this period. It is also from around
this time that other Japanese artists also began to paint Japanese
women in Chinese dress.
What was Fujishimas motivation in painting a portrait that, on
one hand, was inspired by the Italian Renaissance, but, on the other,

Takeji-ten, brought out on the eve of his retrospective exhibition, Bridgestone Museum of Art, April 2002.

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

351

Figure 11.2. Copy after Pisanellos Portrait of Ginevra dEste.

employed a Japanese female body decked up in Chinese costume?

Some contemporary critics interpreted it as the painters attempt to
bring together East and West by juxtaposing the Orient, as represented by the subject, with the Occident, as represented by the
paintings expressive means. In 1924, sumi Tamez suggested that
such cultural juxtaposition of Renaissance art and Chinese dress is
what led Fujishima to title his painting, Ty-buri, in the manner of
the Orient, as opposed to simply Ty, the Orient, calling atten-

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ikeda shinobu

Figure 11.3. Fujishima at his atelier.

tion to a hybrid cultural identity.3 Indeed, to this day, mainstream

modern Japanese art history interprets this painting as a work of
convergence wherein East meets West.4
Fujishima has written that he wished to create an archetypal
Oriental beauty using the figure of a Japanese female. Yet, in order
to represent such an archetypal Oriental beauty, the painter relied
on culturally heterogeneous means. As to why he invoked the authority of what is a typically European formalistic tradition while employing a Japanese female body in a Chinese costume, he is said to have
stated that during his travels to Italy between 1907 and 1908 he was
struck by the quality of patina in the works by Piero and Leonardo
da Vinci, which he felt was akin to the quiet, elegant simplicity of
3
Critical Review of the Exhibition of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (Part
II): Western Painting (Concluding Part), Tokyo Nichi-nichi shinbun, October 17,
1924.
4
Fujishima Takeji-ten (Bridgestone Museum of Art, April 2002), p. 101. Fujishima,
in his own words, declares this painting as being a sort of epoch-making departure;
the section discussing this painting is entitled The Profile of a Woman: An Intersection of East and West.

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

353

Figure 11.4. Fujishima Takeji, Hkei (Profile of a Woman Holding an Orchid), 1926. A
color plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

the Eastern spirit. Fujishima hence sought to visualize an Oriental

female beauty by consciously, and somewhat paradoxically, appropriating a quintessentially Occidental expressive form.5 Conversely,
5
Fujishima notes, In those days, I often used to collect Chinese dresses and they
numbered some fifty to sixty pieces. But, even if I managed the material, the difficulty was that there was nothing beautiful in the profile of Japanese womans face
My desire to paint surged on obtaining an adequate model, not because the motive
lay in painting a Shina-woman at all costs. I wanted to create an archetypal Oriental beauty using a Japanese woman. It would be an ample explanation for the reason
behind the work, if one is to say that Occidental profiles characteristic of the Renaissance led me to painting it. I am attempting to move away from the stereotype Occidental effect, but by exploiting the ways and means of Western painting. I am least

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the work demonstrates Fujishimas dissociation from Eastern painting

traditions of representing female beauty, at least on the level of composition, style, and painting technique. Although he depicts a Japanese
woman in Chinese dress, it is worth noting that the style of his painting does not correspond, for example, to the Qing tradition of painting
beautiful women.
Instead of considering these paintings as pictures that bring together
East and West in a fusion, I find it more significant to regard
them as images that actually expose the rift between the West
(represented by the painting style), China (the dress), and Japan
(female body). When Ty-buri was first exhibited, Ishii Hakutei, a
fellow oil painter and art critic, defended the work by arguing that
it was not a piece of masquerade6. That Ishii was compelled to use
the term masquerade, that is to say disguise, nonetheless reveals
that this painting contained elements of internal tension that threatened to open up rifts between the West, the East, China, and Japan.
Fujishima tried to seamlessly join these categories together by claiming his image to be a representation of what he called archetypical
Oriental beauty. However, it is difficult to arrive at such an abstract
interpretation by merely peering at the painting, without the context
of his narrative texts or other contemporaneous written and visual
documents.
At the beginning, I mentioned that the Chinese dress in Fujishimas paintingsas well as in the works other Japanese artists from
the late 1910s and the early 1920swas, in fact, a typically Manchu
costume. The Qing dynasty was a Manchu dynasty, and during that
period the Manchu qipao was imposed upon the Chinese people, to
be worn particularly on formal and ceremonial occasions. But during
the same period, the non-Manchu Chinese in general did not adopt
it as daily wear. It was only in the early twentieth century, under
the newly-established Republic of China that qipao became popular
in China. Some scholars credit this spread to the official adoption

concerned with the mores or model-types of the day. Modern painting does not require any such clear-cut evidence. But, at the same time, I have been all along stressing the need for the recovery of ideas, like the Orient or the Occident (Tracing
My Footprints, Geijutsu no espuri [Ch kron bijutsu shuppan, 1982], pp. 218-219;
first appeared in Bijutsu shinron, April-May, 1930).
6
A Glimpse at Western Painting in the Exhibition of the Imperial Academy of
Fine Arts, Ch bijutsu, vol. 10, no. 11 (November 1924): 45.

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

355

of qipao as a school uniform for girls in urban areas. But during this
period, its design changed under the influence of European-style
clothing. And by late 1920s, the overall size, including sleeves,
became shorter, while the upper front and waist area were tailored
to closely fit the body. By the 1930s, it became fashionable to sport
a very tall collar. According to the fashion historian Daimaru
Hiroshi, there was a drastic transformation of womens wear in China
in the early twentieth century. He argues that the very definition
of Chinese dress was becoming somewhat ambiguous due to such
metamorphoses.7
Returning to Fujishimas Ty-buri, which was painted in the mid1920s, one realizes that he chose to depict his subject wearing not a
modern, re-invented qipao, but rather the archaic, elaborate costume
worn during the Qing dynasty. In other words, although Fujishima
drapes his subject in a costume that is anachronistic, one that recalls
Chinas lost dynastic past, he intentionally negates any reference to
the traditional image of female beauty in China, despite certainly
being knowledgeable about it.
Among his sketches are found drawings of a Han beauty (Figure
11.5) and another of a Manchu beauty (Figure 11.6). Both demonstrate the painters familiarity with the traditional image of female
beauty in the Qing dynasty. However, by employing the formal image
of women from Italian Renaissance art, on the one hand, while
clothing the female Japanese subject in archaic qipao costume epitomizing a by-gone China, on the other, Fujishima consciously composed Ty-buri in order to help the contemporary viewer recognize
a distinctive rift between these respective elements and the tradition
of classical painting representative of the West. China, as repre7
Japanese Views of Chinese Dress During the Interwar Period, Fzoku, Nihon
fzoku-shi gakkai, vol. 27, no. 3, (September 1988): 58-83; Daimarus research deals
with the changes and improvisations that took place with regard to Chinese dress
during the period from 1930-1940 in China and brings to light the process by which
the attitudes of the Japanese towards the Chinese took shape. However, it falls short
of accounting for the relation between discourse content and changing historical
circumstances, the social status of the speakers, the readership of media by which
their views disseminated, etc. He concludes by reading the fears and desires felt by
Japanese males towards the political self-assertion of Chinese women, their advance
into society, and the westernization of urban culture. But there is ample evidence for
the same conclusion to be arrived at with regard to the views of city-based literati,
culturati and artists associated with Japans modernism of the earlier period spanning the later half of the 1920s to the mid-1930s.

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ikeda shinobu

Figure 11.5. Fujishima Takeji, a sketch from the catalogue Fujishima Takeji-ten, p. 212.

sented in Fujishimas paintings, is hence figured as an elegant costume

from a by-gone era, and he chose to emphasize this idea of pastness by employing yet another past tradition, namely, the European
past of Italian Renaissance. The picture thereby refers to the past of
both China and Europe in order to create the image of tradition.
Furthermore, it calls the viewers attention to the gaze of the artist
and his mastery, as a modern Japanese painter, over these different
traditions. The artist seems to be suggesting that while he has access
to these different painting traditions, he is not bound by them, and
that he is ultimately free to choose what pleases him in order to create a distinctly modern ideal of beauty that is unique to him alone.
An Amazon (Figure 11.7) was another entry that Fujishima submitted, along with Ty-buri, to the Fifth Exhibition of the Imperial
Academy of Fine Arts. He described the painting as showing a
young woman on horseback, taking a ride on the beach.8 The image
of young women clad in bathing suits on the beach was a popular

Tracing My Footprints, p. 219.

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

357

Figure 11.6. Fujishima Takeji, a sketch from the catalogue Fujishima Takeji-ten, p. 213.

subject in Japanese avant-garde art between the mid-1920s and the

early 1930s. The surreal setting of the scene in An Amazon attests to
Fujishimas knowledge of the latest artistic trends in Europe, such as
Surrealism. However, in strategic contrast to Ty-buri, the overall
idea of this work was to express what Fujishima defined as sportsmanship and athletic beauty.9 By pairing these two contrasting
imagesa traditional Oriental beauty signifying calm and serenity, on the one hand, and a modern, athletic ideal of female beauty
9

Tracing My Footprints, p. 219.

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ikeda shinobu

Figure 11.7. Fujishima Takeji, An Amazon, 1923.

associated with a kind of Japanese Modern Girl that the Japanese

government was promoting at the time, on the otherFujishima
demonstrated his ability to portray both the past and the present.
Fujishima was not the only artist who represented China as the
past. A few years earlier, another Japanese oil painter, Kishida Rysei
(1891-1929), depicted a similar image in the portrait of his younger
sister, Teruko, clothed in an old-fashioned Manchu dress (Figure
11.8). Kishida produced a number of such portraits that were styled
after the tradition of northern Renaissance portraits, which he was

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359

Figure 11.8. Kishida Rysei, Portrait of my Sister, Teruko, in Chinese Dress, 1921.

aware of through photographic reproductions. His still-life portraits,

on the other hand, appropriated the meticulous style of Sung and
Yuan paintings. Like Fujishima, Kishida too turned to the historical
art traditions of both Chinese Southern School of paintingnanga,
or Japanese bunjinga (literati painting)and that of Expressionism of
continental Europe, while establishing an idiosyncratic style of his
owna hotly debated topic in the art of the Taish period.10
Illustrations by Mizushima Niou also show their subjects in clothing basically derived from Manchu costumes. Figures 11.9 and 11.10

10
Nijusseiki nihon bijutsu hakken II: 1920 nendai (Mie Prefectural Art Museum,
1996).

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ikeda shinobu

are illustrations used in a novel by Tanizaki Junichir entitled The

Mermaids Lament, published in 1919. The compositions depict the
female protagonist sitting on a bed and playing the Chinese erhu,
recalling the popular image of a Qing belle. In these pictures, the
long coat looks like a theater coat that became fashionable as evening
dress in Paris in the early twentieth century, and was inspired by the
costumes of Qing officials.11 Mizushimas drawing style resembles
that of Aubrey Beardsley, the turn-of-the-century British illustrator,
whose own style incorporated elements of Japanese woodblock prints.
Mizushimas prints thus create an imaginary China through the lens
of turn-of-the-century European Orientalism, inviting the Japanese
viewer to take pleasure in looking at a fictive China that Europeans
then imagined as the Orient.
It is a historical fact that portraying women clad in the so-called
Chinese dress was in vogue among Japanese artists around this
time. But, as the modern Japanese art historian Kojima Kaoru has
noted recently, their portrayal was a clear departure from the traditional iconography of the Qing belle, or the profiles of geisha composed
in the style of literati paintings of the first half of Meiji period. According to Kojima, it was Kuroda Seiki (given name Kiyoteru, 1866-1924)
and his successors, Okada Sabursuke (1869-1939) and Fujishima
Takeji, who introduced the Western stereotype of the belle and created
certain normative models for the image of Japanese feminine beauty.
All three of artists were major players in the government-sponsored
art exhibitions and continued to exercise strong influence on the
artist community as academicians at the Tokyo Fine Arts School.
The models she identifies are classified into four categories, that is,
a) the body of a Western woman, b) Japanese female nudes, c)
Japanese woman clothed in Japanese-style costume, and d) Japanese woman clothed in Chinese dress as inaugurated by Ty-buri.
Kojima argues that Japanese men made distinctions between these
categories according to differing situations and constructed a selfimage of themselves while portraying images of the West (Occident), Japan/Nippon or Japan as the Oriental hegemon ruling
Asia.12 Although her argument is highly persuasive, it must be pointed
11

Fukui Akiko, ed., Mdo no Japonizumu, 1996.

The Formation of Japanese Identity as Seen in the Image of a Woman in
Chinese Dress, Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, Jissen Womens Educational Institute,
no. 44 (March 2002).
12

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361

Figure 11.9. Mizushima Niou, book illustration from The Mermaids Lament, 1919.

out that Japanese representations of women in Chinese dress during

the interwar period were not uniform, but diverse.
For instance, Kobayashi Mangos painting In Front of a Silver Screen
(Figure 11.11) of 1925 sends a message different from the works of
Fujishima and Kishida. The female, perched on a chair, wears a
more casual of qipao, and her pose expresses a much greater sense
of ease and movement, unlike the subjects portrayed in the paintings
of Fujishima or Kishida. The way she is shown sitting on the chair,
as well as the gesture of her hands, are lively and relaxed. Moreover,

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Figure 11.10. Mizushima Niou, book illustration from The Mermaids Lament, 1919.

she is depicted wearing her hair in a style that was fashionable at

the time. Kobayashis painting of the Japanese woman in Chinese
dress is a generic portrayal of contemporary life, and the casual
Manchu dress in this painting does not function as a symbol representing China as the past.
Similar representations of Japanese women in Chinese dress are
found in the womens magazines of this period. In the July 1927
issue of Josei, the cover shows a woman wearing an unusually short
qipao and red slippers (Figure 11.12). The viewers gaze is led to her
slender legs. Her short, permed hair and her downward gaze add to

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363

Figure 11.11. Kobayashi Mango, In Front of a Silver Screen, 1925.

her sexual appeal. In the December 1927 issue, a female figure with
a short bob haircut appears in a qipao-like coat with red high-heel
shoes (Figure 11.13). This magazine targeted a readership consisting
mainly urban middle-class women. These cover pictures created a
fanciful image of Chinese dresses as a kind of ideal fashion statement,
rather than representing the actual Chinese dresses that Japanese
women were wearing at that time.
Such images of Chinese dress also appeared in magazines with
different readerships. For example, the cover picture of the July 1928
issue of Shinseinen (Figure 11.14), which was popular among young
Japanese men, shows a Chinese woman playing the erhu.

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Figure 11.12. Cover picture of Josei, July 1927.

According to the fashion historian Daimaru, Chinese dress became

fashionable in Japan in the late 1920s, and its popularity peaked
around the years 1932 and 1933.13 It was mostly adopted as summer
dress. From the mid-1920s onwards, magazine articles and other
published materials also appeared that attempted to characterize
China through its clothes. Some of these texts were sewing manuals
that promoted the adoption of Chinese dress among Japanese women,
insisting that they were easier to sew than European-style dresses,
and that they were better fitted to the East Asian physique of Japanese
women. Such opinions presented China to the modern Japanese
consumer as an alternative to the West. On a broader level, the
13
Japanese Views of Chinese Dress During the Interwar Period, p. 59; Got
Asatar, Shina-minzoku no tenb (Toyamab, 1936).

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

365

Figure 11.13. Cover picture of Josei, December 1927.

suggestion that Japan should incorporate China rather than Europe

helped to construct Japans self-image as an Eastern empire that
resisted total cultural subjugation by the West. Mizushima, whose
illustrations (Figures 11.9 and 11.10) were discussed earlier, published
an article, entitled In Praise of Chinese Dress and Chinese Women,
in the Japanese womens magazine, Fujin Gah, in 1924. His opinions
were based on a trip to Shanghai, and in it he praised how Chinese
men looked princely, and how the women possessed a similarly worthy
appearance. In contrast, Mizushima criticized the Japanese, on the

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Figure 11.14. Cover picture, Shinseinen, July 1928.

other hand, for being short and dirty-looking, and Westerners, particularly Americans, on the other, for being an inferior race with an
appearance that was beast-like. He was enamored of modern Chinese
women, and described them in the following terms:
Some of them have meticulously permed bangs, and others wear glasses,
a delicate wristwatch, or carry a slender, yellowperhaps plasticcane.
Most such women also smoke. Their jackets and coats are, of course,
short. The patterns on the fabric of their clothes and their hairstyles
are eccentric. Is she a courtesan? I asked my travel companion, Mr.
M. And he replied, No, she is a new kind of woman in China. From
that time on, I encountered many such New Women in China. Unlike
the New Women of Japan, the New Women in China do not wear
odd-looking Western-style dresses.14

It is interesting that Mizushima first mistook the New Woman for a

courtesan due to her striking appearance, one that he obviously found
14

Fujin gah (September 1924): 91-93.

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

367

sexually appealing. One of the illustrations that accompanied this

article is entitled, A Beautiful, New Chinese Woman (Figure 11.15),
which shows the woman that he described as having a meticulously
permed bangs.
Another representation of modern Chinese women can be found
in a book illustration from a 1928 publication entitled, On Chinese
Clothes,15 written by Shu Hokush. This book was intended to promote
a better understanding of Chinese clothes in Japan. Arguing that the
Chinese and the Japanese have been close for centuries, the author
laments the lack of understanding about China among modern Japanese and advises the Japanese to become better acquainted with their
neighbor. He also emphasizes that the culture of idealism unique
to the East is more profound than the culture of materialism of
the West. At the same time, however, the kinds of Chinese clothes
he discusses were, for the most part, of modern, Europeanized design
popular amongst urban women. And he asserts that the formal clothes
of China resembled those of Europe in certain respects. The types
of Chinese women featured in this book includes the so-called modan
gru (moga), as well as the stylish Shanghai belle, that is, a modern,
intellectual type of women with glasses and a narrow wristwatch
(Figure 11.16).
Similarly, in a cartoon featured in an article entitled Modern
Women Through the Eyes of a Cartoonist, published in the magazine Fujo-kai (Womans World) in January 1929, we see the caricature
of a contemporary Chinese moga aboard a train (Figure 11.17), her
clothes almost looking like a Western-style dress.
Through such representations, the image of modern Chinese
women became incorporated into that of the Modern Girl in Japan.
Moreover, during this period, the Japanese media also focused on
Chinese women who were leading successful careers in Japan, such
as painters and the like,16 and therefore wearing Chinese dress pro-

15

Ta kenky-kza series publication, no. 24 (Ta Kenky-kai, 1928).

Media discourse carried success stories of women in China in the fields of education, political activism and other professional occupations, the tenor of which
showed a strong tendency to demean the advances made by Japanese women and
point to their late awakening. The artistic careers of notable Chinese women active
in Japan, like artist Guan Zilan and dancer Zhou Qiulan, too, made headlines and
were projected as beauty model-types.
16

368

ikeda shinobu

Figure 11.15. Mizushima Niou, book illustration, A Beautiful, New Chinese Woman,
September 1924.

jected an image of modernization, as well as of Westernization.17

The Japanese public took interest in the fashion of contemporary
17

In 1927, Kon Wajir published the results of a comparative study on the malefemale ratio of wearing Western-style clothes in public places. In 1925, 67% of men
wore Western clothes versus 1% among women on Ginza Street. But the figure for
women rose to 16%, as against that of 61% for men, by 1928 in the case of a sample
taken in front of the Mitsukoshis at Nihonbashi. Further, in the case of the relative
proportion of appearance in visual culture, Western-style costumes appeared in 22
entries of works displayed at the Fourteenth Exhibition of the Association of Artists,
Nikakai, as against 13 for Japanese-style and 2 for Chinese-style costumes (A Statistical Survey of Folk Images of Women, Tokyo Nichi-nichi Shinbun, 11 September
1927).

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

369

Figure 11.16. Shu Hokush, book illustration, On Chinese Clothes, 1928.

Chinese women, representing the idea of what a modern woman

should be and look like.
At the Crossing, a painting by Kakiuchi Seiyo from 1930, portrays
two Japanese women in the fashionable district of Ginza (Figure
11.18). In contrast to the woman in kimono in front, with a rather
expressionless face, the woman in modern Chinese dress, holding a
parasol with a design of lilies, is depicted with a less reserved expression on her face. Her gaze shoots out of the frame, catching the
viewers attention.
The discourse on Chinese dress in Japan was built upon similarities to, and contrasts with, Western-style clothing. Some encouraged
the adoption of Chinese dress by the Japanese, stating that China
was a country closer to Japan than those of the West, while others
argued for its adoption precisely because of its affinity with European-

370

ikeda shinobu

Figure 11.17. Moga in Chinese Dress as Seen Aboard a Train in China, Fujo-kai, January
1929.

style dress. Daimaru has pointed out that the Japanese interest in
modern Chinese dress was informed by the Westernization of clothing that was taking place in China at that time.18 Adoption of modern
Chinese dress, against that of the West, was hence regarded as a way
of modernizing, and Westernizing, the clothing practice in Japan
itself. However, as Daimaru remarks, it should not be forgotten that
18

Cf. Daimaru Hiroshis research (note 6).

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

371

Figure 11.18. Kakiuchi Seiyo, At the Crossing, 1930. A color plate of this illustration
can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

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ikeda shinobu

there also existed in Japan at the same time a negative discourse

about China and Chinese clothing. Chinese lifestyle was looked down
upon as being unhygienic and backward. As a matter of fact,
the Japanese conception of China generally oscillated between such
divergent views.
A glimpse of such polarized attitudes may be seen in the Japanese
imagination of Chinese cities, especially Shanghai, for example. Many
Japanese saw Shanghai as a modern metropolis, much like Paris or
New York. Japanese, on the one hand, perceived Shanghai as a
modern, Westernized city, exemplified by its European-style public
buildings and peoples clothes. But, on the other hand, many Japanese
despised the Chinese urban environment and labeled it as dirty,
backward, and infested with poverty, crime, prostitution, and opium
dens. In the novels of Japanese modernist writers such as Tanizaki
Junichir, Akutagawa Rynosuke, and Yokomitsu Riichi, China was
portrayed as at once being a seductive, yet dangerous place, where
Japanese male protagonists fall prey to sexual pleasure and criminal
activities. The female Chinese characters play a pivotal role in the
works of these male authors. They are often portrayed as a hybrid
figure. They come from different social classes and assume many
guises. Some of them are depicted as being westernized, with modern,
short haircuts, speaking English and smoking cigarettes. They also
appear as young Communist leaders of a proletariat movement or
as members of the Chinese resistance against Japan. Sometimes they
are portrayed as being of mixed blood, being part-Chinese, partEuropean or part-Japanese, whereas, some other portrayals show
them collapsing the very boundaries of gender. The bodies of such
hybrid women in Chinese dress, not limited by either national borders
or gender, act as femmes fatales, negotiating with the men not only
from Imperial Japan but also from other imperial countries. These
men compete with one another in order to possess her, and their
rivalry in romantic exploits serves as a metaphor for imperial rivalry
among the nations they represent.
For Japanese male writers, Shanghai was a topos where the visiting
male protagonist initially challenges and destabilizes his Japanese
identity. Yet, eventually, it also happens to be a place where he
reconfirms his Japanese identity, whether he likes it or not. For
example, in the 1932 novel by Yokomitsu Riichi entitled, Shanghai,
the protagonists experiences in Shanghai work to reinforce his aware-

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

373

ness that he is Japanese after all. The novel is set in 1925, when a
series of major strikes were held against Japan and Japanese factory
owners in Shanghai. There is a scene in the novel where the main
character, Sanki, walks around the city in the midst of violent protests.
He wears Chinese clothes in order to disguise himself as a Chinese,
but realizes that even if he wished to shed his Japanese identity, the
external environment would not allow him to do so. It forces him
only to reaffirm the Japanese/masculine identity of his body and
souldespite the skin, the masquerade, of Chinese dress. At another
point in the novel, he concludes that a Japanese person in Shanghai
can only live as a beggar or as a prostitute if one does not accept
the homeland. Many men left Japan for China in order to escape
the homeland, yet often ended up realizing that they could not shed
the identity of their homeland while make a living in China. It is
interesting to note in Yokomitsus novel that the act of wearing Chinese dress, paradoxically collapses only to reiterate the protagonists
original identity of being Japanese and male.19
Clothed in Chinese dress, women in Yokomitsus Shanghai (as well
as in other similar novels) are portrayed as being hybrid, decadent
figures without boundaries, serving as objects of seductive negotiation
for males. The image of these woman, that is encoded in both written and visual representation, alternates with that of China itself as
the Other. This is a site where the masculinity-driven ambition of
both modernism and imperialism expands and engages with its object,
the Other, reaching out only to subsume itbe it Woman or
in this case China. Worn by the female, Chinese dress, symbolizing
a passage in the encounter with the Other, does not serve to subvert
the self-identity of the narrator or viewer (male/imperial Japan), but
instead, precisely makes possible control and dominion over the object
(Woman/China) by integrating and appropriating the narrative subject. Japanese writers and intellectuals who sought an escape from
the shackles of norms and customs of their own country projected
China by superimposing it on a woman whose identity is portrayed
as not being confined to the boundaries of any one single ethnic or
national community. Such a representation takes the form of an
image of the body of a woman, infused with a hybridity that invalidates and collapses the very concept of boundary. It is amply evident
19

Shanghai (Kdansha, 1991), pp. 199-203.

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ikeda shinobu

from the sources discussed here that such a rendition by Japanese

writers of China, as a female figure whose body constantly collapses
the notion of a fixed boundary, is but identical to the imperial project
of Japan as a whole, which sought to assimilate China by dissolving
the very border separating her from itself.
Returning to visual portraiture, the Portrait of Chin-Jung, 1934 (Figure 11.19) by Yasui Star is perhaps the best-known painting of a
Japanese woman in modern Chinese dress. This picture won great
critical acclaim when it was first exhibited, along with a portrait of
a high school headmaster, Portrait of Mr. Tamamushi (Figure 11.20).
Kojima Kikuo, who was a professor of art history at Tohoku Imperial University and also a painter himself, praised these works in the
following terms:
The artistic efforts of Mr. Yasui, who has presented two wonderful
portraits here, are remarkable. By these, one can only imagine how
much the Japanese painting world owes to Mr. Yasui. Truly, these
portraits are unprecedented. They herald the arrival of contemporary
portrait painting in Japan. The originality of these works is worth being
presented to the world outside Japan. I dare say they are canonical
works of modern realismThe facial expression of Mr. Tamamushi,
as well as the depiction of his fist and posture, captures the essence of
the subjects dignified character. In Portrait of Chin-Jung (Chin-Jung, by
the way, is the Chinese reading of this Japanese ladys name), see how
masterfully he has rendered her nasty gaze. The line of her nose reminds
me of the line he used to draw the crotch of a female nude he exhibited last year. Look at the ease with which he painted her sensuous
arms, the posture of her upper body that tilts up to the right, and the
drapery that hangs from her lap. Perhaps, he could have made her
thighs look a bit more plump.20

The model of the male portrait, Mr. Tamamushi, was a headmaster

of a national high school in Sendai, in northern Japan. It was commissioned as a gift to be presented by the school to commemorate
his retirement. The model for the female portrait was a woman
named, Odagiri Mineko.21 Yasui was introduced to her by Marquis
20

Review of Nikakai (Part III), Tokyo mainichi shinbun, September 10, 1934.
In Yasuis reminiscences Portraits Painted by Myself (Bungei shunj, April
1951), he refers to his model, Odagiri Mineko, as being a pretty woman of strong
disposition and whom the Chinese dress suited very well. Odagiri, on the other hand,
in her reminiscences carried in My Memories of Mr. Yasui, published in 1962,
recollects various episodes with Yasui and Fujishima during her days at Harbin. She
also became the role-model of the tragic heroine in Chinese dress in Nagayo
21

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

Figure 11.19. Yasui Star, Portrait of Chin-Jung, 1934.

375

376

ikeda shinobu

Figure 11.20. Portrait of Mr. Tamamushi.

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

377

Hosokawa Moritatsu, an avid patron of the fine arts. Although Kojima

praised both the works, he judged them according to different sets
of standards. In contrast to his admiration for the male portrait,
Kojimas assessment of the female portrait reveals a mixture of erotic
engagement and repulsion. Phrases such as her nasty gaze express
Kojimas sense of disapproval, threatened by this modern woman,
with short hair, and sitting defiantly with her legs crossed.
The following year, Miyamoto Sabur, another prominent oil
painter, exhibited Women in Three Fashion Modes (Figure 11.21). It
portrays three young women wearing Western, Japanese, and Chinese
styles of dress, respectively. The woman in Western-style costume is
helping another in Japanese-style to do her hair. Both of them are
absorbed in their activities and are shown as being unaware of the
viewers presence. In contrast, however, the figure of the woman in
Chinese dress is sitting apart from the other two, and turning her
gaze directly to the viewer. In the 1936, a painting by Okada Sabursuke (1869-1939), entitled Portrait of a Lady (Figure 11.22), features
a female model in qipao who is likewise portrayed with a frank
gaze.
But portraying Japanese women in Chinese dress with a dynamic,
active gaze was quite exceptional and is a notable feature of Japanese
painting at the time. Rather, from the 1910s, Japanese artists represented women living on the periphery of the Japanese empire, such
as rural women, Taiwanese, as also Korean women. These images
together emphasized their indigenous character, conflating backwardness with femininity in a typical Orientalist manner.
The representation of kisaeng, or Korean courtesans, is a case in
point. In a painting by Tsuchida Bakusen (1887-1936) entitled, Flat
Bed of 1933 (Figure 11.23), two Korean courtesans, their shoes off,
are shown with passive expressions. By the 1930s, when Tsuchida
painted this image, there was a heated debate concerning New
Woman in colonial Korea, who represented a new generation of
women with modern education. These liberated women were rarely
discussed in Japan, however.
The image of a Japanese woman in Chinese dress signified something totally different, though. She stood for a hybrid China that
Japan sought to disengage from the West and to appropriate as part
Yoshirs serial novel Sono yoru, though the depiction of the heroine has little to do
with Odagiris own life.

Figure 11.21. Miyamoto Sabur, Women in Three Fashion Styles, 1935. A color plate of this illustration can be found in
the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

378
ikeda shinobu

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

379

Figure 11.22. Okada Saburousuke, Portrait of a Lady, 1936.

of the Japanese empire. From the mid-1920s, Japanese culture tried

to disavow its fear of China by personifying China in the form of
a young attractive woman in Chinese dress, and consumed her image
as a variant/mutation of the Modern Girl (moga). And yet, such
a seductive figure was one who, at the same time, opposed being
monopolized by the imperial Japanese male artist or viewer. As is
seen in Portrait of Chin-Jung, the woman in Chinese dress possessed a
gaze of her own, and the male critics reaction to such a defiant gaze

Figure 11.23. Tsuchida Bakusen, Flat Bed, 1933. A color plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on
pp. xvii-xxxii.

380
ikeda shinobu

the allure of women clothed in chinese dress

381

was ambivalent. It is symbolic for the painting to have been exhibited

in 1934just a few years after the establishment of Manchukuo.
Japans aggressive invasion and colonization of China was beginning
to invite severe criticism and resistance from inside China. In subsequent years, the representation of Chinese dress also changed, and
I suspect that this was in response to such political changes. However,
the representation of Japanese women in Chinese dress during the
period of wartime Japan is a topic for detailed examination in the
future.22
We can conclude that the figure of a Japanese woman in Chinese
dress represented the male-centered lust for imperialism in Japan
during the interwar period. This desire sought, in fact, to appropriate
and monopolize the Other under the garb of what has hitherto
been favorably evaluated as a fusion, or cross-fertilization attributed to the Taish avant-garde. The representation of a woman in
Chinese dress in visual and written narratives of imperial Japan,
however, attempted to seamlessly join together what was, in reality,
a rift between the heterogeneous elements of a Japanese womans
body, the Chinese clothing in which it was draped, and the various
artistic styles and techniques employed, under the insidious rhetoric
of assimilation. Unfortunately, the narrative representation of
woman in Chinese dress only ends up revealing the rifts in such
assimilation, as well as those in the hierarchical gender configuration of the colonial discourse prevalent in Imperial Japan at the time.
Surely it is the humble responsibility of a critical historian of art to
severely question and analyze the process of such a historical phenomenon.

22
Ikeda Shinobu, Representation of Women in China Dress: Imperial Male
Intellectuals and the Construction of Identity in Wartime Japan, presented at the
symposium War and Representation/Art after the 20th Century, organized by the research
project committee headed by Nagata Kenichi, School of Humanities & Social
Sciences, Chiba University, Tokyo National Museum Heisei-kan Auditorium, 4-5
March 2006.

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ikeda shinobu

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

383

UTAGAWA SHUNGA, KUKIS CHIC, AND THE

CONSTRUCTION OF A NATIONAL EROTICS IN JAPAN
Joshua S. Mostow

Kuki Shz (1888-1941) is best known for his 1930 Iki no Kz, or
The Structure of Iki. This work is, after the writings of Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) and his championing of mono no aware (the capacity
to be moved deeply by things),1 a foundational text in Japanese
key-word essentialism, which is in turn a major strategy of Japanese
exceptionalism (nihonjin ron). Kuki claimed that the true essence of
Japanese ethnicity was to be found in the concept of iki, or bordello chic, a kind of fashion and style that developed in the
unlicensed prostitution district of Fukagawa in the city of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) in the Bunka and Bunsei eras, that is, 1804-1829.
Kuki was the son of Baron Kuki Ryichi (1850-1931), the Japanese Minister in the United States (chbei kshi) in the 1880s, and the
first director of the Imperial Museum. He was also the bureaucrat
responsible for, among other things, overseeing the Japanese pavilion
at the 1900 Exposition universelle de Paris, for which the first modern
history of Japanese art was produced. Shz himself identified
Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913, best-known for The Book of Tea) as his
spiritual father and indeed there have long been suggestions that
Okakura was his biological father as well. In any event, Kuki Shzs
presentation of the concept of iki can be seen as continuing in the
course set by Okakura in the latters use of Hegelian philosophy to
construct the concept of an Asian world-spirit (Geist) in contrast to
that of the West, one that was seen to have achieved its fullest manifestation in Japan.
In 1921 Kuki left for Europe and spent the next eight years studying philosophy in Germany and France. In France he met Henri
Bergson and was tutored by Jean-Paul Sartre. In Germany, he studied the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and the
1
Haruo Shirane, The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji (Stanford:
University Press, 1987), p. 31.

384

joshua s. mostow

hermeneutical philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Kuki returned to

Japan in 1929 and took up a position in the philosophy department
of Kyoto University.
Kuki completed a first draft of The Structure of Iki in December
1926,2 while at the Sorbonne.3 The concept of iki clearly owes something to Baudelaire and bears some resemblance to the concept of
the dandy, a resemblance that Kuki goes to some pains to deny. In
the early drafts, Kuki avails himself of Edo-period sentimental fiction,
or ninjbon; kabuki theater; and Edo fzoku-shi, or histories of the
customs and mores of the Edo period which were produced largely
in the 1920s, pulling out passages from these for examples of iki, as
if gathering Arnoldian touchstones, with all quotations referenced to
his sources. It is only in the later version that these references are
largely removed, and these touchstones are presented as too wellknown to require documenting. This change represents a fundamental re-orientation, from seeing research on iki as a kind of reconstruction
of a dead language, to the insistence on every Japanese as a native
speaker of its ethnic aesthetics.4
When he was not engaged in philosophical study, Kuki seems to
have spent his time being entertained by the high-class courtisanes of
ParisMichael Marra provides an annotated list: Yvonne, Denise,
Rina, Marianne, Louise, Henriette, Jeannine, Rene, Yvette. 5 He
also wrote poems about his experiencescomprising what Leslie
Pincus has called an eroticized Guide bleu6which were published
in such venues as Myj, the house-organ of the Japanese Romantic
movement:

Hiroshi Nara, The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shz, with a
translation of Iki no kz (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 9
3
Michael F. Marra, Kuki Shz: A Philosophers Poetry and Poetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 9.
4
Such a stance is not unique to Kuki, as can be seen in the following by the historian of Edo-period culture, Nishiyama Matsunosuke: Iki seems to be a specifically
Japanese form of aesthetic consciousness. Pinpointing where or how a person embodies the quality of iki may be difficult, but its presence is felt by every Japanese.
The aesthetic of iki is, in this sense, the common property of the Japanese people.
Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868, trans. Gerald Groemer
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), p. 53.
5
Marra, Kuki Shz, p. 29.
6
Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shz and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 41.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

kimi to nete
bdorru no
ku o utai
par no yayoi
yo to tomo ni fuku

385

Sleeping with you

I recite a verse
of Baudelaires
in Paris, March
deepens together with the night.

Of course, since The Structure of Iki is based on the culture of early

nineteenth-century geisha and prostitutes, Kuki no doubt saw his
nocturnal activities as related to his philosophical investigations.
1. Kukis Perverse Preference
Leslie Pincus notes that . . . Kukis preference for late Edo culture
has impressed many a reader as eccentric, if not perverse.7 A more
typical choice might have been the Heian period (795-1185), which
is usually referred to as Japans classical era. Indeed, we should
take a moment to consider just how revolutionary Kuki was in locating the source of his national aesthetics in the late Edo Ka-sei-ki,
that is, the Bunka and Bunsei eras. It is not simply a matter of period,
or historical location. What Kuki is in fact doing is turning a halfcentury-long discourse on its head. This was the discourse around
the treatment of women in Japan.
The supposedly comparatively barbarous treatment of Japanese
women by Japanese men, including the popularity of prostitution
and concubinage, was one of the principal yardsticks by which the
Western powers claimed that Japan fell short of civilization, a failing which justified the unequal treaties the Western powers had
foisted on Japan. And from the beginning of the Meiji period until
1930, there was hardly a Japanese thinker who did notat least at
face-valuetake this condemnation as legitimate (in a way analogous
to Chinese thinkers declaring footbinding the national shame).
Even Okakura Tenshin, perhaps the strongest advocate of Japanese
cultural equality with the European nations, admitted the superiority
of the status of western women, albeit not without an element of
irony. I quote from The Awakening of Japan: The Western attitude of
profound respect toward the gentler sex exhibits a beautiful phase

Pincus, p. 103.

386

joshua s. mostow

of refinement which we are anxious to emulate. It is one of the

noblest messages that Christianity has given us.8 Okakura goes on
to insist that In Japan, woman has always commanded a respect
and freedom not to be found elsewhere in the East,9 blaming much
of her low status on Chinese influence. He even gives the example
of Meish Tenn, the female mikado who ascended the throne in
1630neglecting to point out that this was done as a form of protest
by the court and clergy against a policy of the bakufu, or samurai
government. He continues:
We have never hitherto, however, learned to offer any special privileges
to woman. Love has never occupied an important place in Chinese
literature; and in the tales of Japanese chivalry, the samurai, although
ever at the service of the weak and oppressed, gave his help quite
irrespective of sex. To-day we are convinced that the elevation of
woman is the elevation of the race. She is the epitome of the past and
the reservoir of the future, so that the responsibilities of the new social
life which is dawning on the ancient realms of the Sun-goddess may
be safely intrusted [sic] to her care. Since the Restoration we have not
only confirmed the equality of sex in law, but have adopted that attitude of respect which the West pays to woman. She now possesses all
the rights of her Western sister, though she does not care to insist upon
them; for almost all of our women still consider the home, and not
society, as their proper sphere.10

In fact, it is on the very next page that Okakura brings up the issue
of the unequal treaties, showing the close association in his mind
between the civilized treatment of women and diplomatic equality.
In other words, until Kuki, Japanese thinkers had in the main
accepted the ideals of Christian monogamous marriage, and the
bourgeois woman as the angel of the homethe mainstays of
Victorian morality. Earlier Christian thinkers such as Nitobe Inaz
had attempted to re-write the concept of bushido into one of Western
chivalry, and we hear echoes of this in the quotes from Okakura. It
is only in this context that we can see how radical a departure Kuki
has made, by locating the heart of Japanese culture in the brothels,

8
Okakura Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan (New York: The Century Company,
1904), p. 224.
9
Okakura, p. 245.
10
Okakura, p. 246.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

387

and offering as the flower of Japanese womanhood the Fukagawa

prostitute.
Kukis attention to the early modern licensed quarters had its
predecessors, however, especially in the writings of Nagai Kaf and
Tanizaki Junichir. In a forthcoming monograph, Gretchen Jones
has drawn attention to a 1919 novella by the latter entitled Fumikos
Feet (Fumiko no ashi). The story revolves around a retired pawnshop
owner who has commissioned a western-style painter to make an oil
painting of the pawnbrokers young mistress, O-Fumi, posed in imitation of a character in an illustration by Utagawa Kunisada
(1786-1864) for Rytei Tanehikos (1783-1842) Nise Murasaki Inaka
Genji. In the process of producing the painting, O-Fumi is turned
into a dominatrix and satisfies the old mans desires by treading on
his face with her feet. Based on the narrators description of the
illustration, we can identify the exact image by Kunisada, which
shows the girl Tasogare wiping her foot on the veranda of an old
temple to which she and the storys hero, Mitsuuji, have fled (Figure
12.1).
The narrators description is one incredibly long paragraph, and
includes the following:
The form of a beautiful woman, whose legs and arms droop like a
weeping willow, in its relaxed and bed-tousled state had its own charms,
but, at the same time, her entire body was bent and twisted around
like a whip, and it was certainly difficult to paint that degree of elasticity without scaring away the special beauty. There was limberness
together with rigidity; within tautness there was delicacy; behind
motion lay languidness. It was like the bush warbler, with its
wholehearted sweetness crying out, and its throat ready to split open,
straining for each note.11

Jones uses this text to discuss what she calls the masochistic aesthetics of Tanizakis writing. One of the things, according to Jones, that
this aesthetic attempts is the unification of opposites, which can be
well seen in this passage with its talk of limberness together with
rigidity, and so forth. Suspension, both literal and figural, is also
frequent. But what I find most interesting here is the combination
in one figure of both dominatrix and dominated. In other words, in

11
Gretchen Jones, Whip Appeal: The Aesthetics of Masochism in Modern Japanese Narrative (forthcoming), p. 372; the translation is by Jones.

Figure 12.1. Utagawa Kunisada, Tasogare on the veranda, Inaka Genji Nise Murasaki, vol. 5a (1840).
Reproduced from Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 88 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), p. 156.

388
joshua s. mostow

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

389

this image it is the woman who is suspended as if in masochistic

restraint, and yet the pawnbroker wants the picture as an icon of his
dominatrix.
Tanehikos Inaka Genji was phenomenally popular, from the start
of its serialized publication in 1829 until the authors sudden death
in 1842, right at the beginning of the repressive Tenp Reforms. In
fact, the rumor spread that Tanehikos death was a seppuku ordered
by the authorities.12 The Tenp Reforms targeted some kabuki actors
and the publication of pornography, actor prints, prostitute prints,
and ninj-bon (or romantic fiction). While the Inaka Genji itself was
probably not problematic, it was well known that there was a covert
production of a spicier version, and Tanehiko also collaborated with
Kunisada in producing illustrated pornographic tales, to which we
shall turn in a moment.
Inaka Genjis reputation continued into the Meiji period, and the
episode of Tasogare (who, like her model, Ygao, dies in this scene)
seems to have been by far the most popular from this long tale. We
see Mitsuuji and Tasogare in a print by Chikanobu for his Setsugetsuka
series, dated between 1884-86. The scene of them fleeing to the
temple was also re-worked, for instance, by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
(1839-92). This print was actually banned by the Meiji authorities,
who were upset that, among the prints offenses were that Mitsuujis
other hand was not visible.13
Thus, even in the Meiji period, or at least by the 1880s, there was
a renewed interest in late Edo-period culture. This interest was even
more pronounced in the early Taish (1912-1925) writings of Kaf
and Tanizaki. But even in these writers the interest in the good, old
bad places (akusho) was presented as a individual, decadent, predilection. It was Kuki who elevated it to an aesthetic category and the
definitional basis for the Japanese people as a whole.

12
See Andrew Lawrence Markus, The Willow in Autumn: Rytei Tankehiko,
1783-1842 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University,
1992).
13
Ann Yonemura, Masterful Illusions: Japanese Prints in the Anne van Biema Collection
(Washington, D.C.: The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2002),
p. 310.

390

joshua s. mostow
2. Iki no Kz as mitate

Kuki employs a Heideggerian methodology to rigorously define iki

and its relations to other Japanese terms of taste (Figure 12.2). He
then demonstrates the character of iki in a wide variety of cultural
productions, from textile patterns to musical modes.
While Kukis choice of time period may have been shocking to
those of the Meiji and Taish periods, his method was in a way
thoroughly traditional. We can see The Structure of Iki as a prime
example of Edo mitate, or parodic juxtaposition, a paradigmatic combination of ga (elegance) and zoku (the vulgar), where the zoku is
Fukagawa and the ga has become the educated elite language of the
day: no longer classical Japanese or literary Chineseas it was in
the Edo periodbut European hermeneutic philosophy. 14 As the
late Andrew Markus wrote:
Prominent in the creativity of the later Edo period is the forced alliance
of ga (the elegant, courtly, classical, or transcendent) and zoku (the
common, coarse, contemporary, or worldly). The incongruity of the
two spheres, when brought into close proximity, generated a new
dynamic, an electricity coursing between opposing poles. The first
examples that come to mind may be vernacular forms of kibyshi of
the last decades of the eighteenth century, and kyka, parodic waka
from the 1760s. The same tension, however, also informs Sino-Japanese literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to such
a degree that we may speak of the emergence of distinctive new genres
of prose and poetry, whose entire appeal hinges on the bipolarity of
ga language, format, and allusion, and zoku content.15

In fact, writings in Chinese about Yoshiwarathe most famous

pleasure quarterwere something of a genre in the Edo period.
Robert Campbell has uncovered the Antiquarian League (Tankikai)
14
Recent scholarly debate in Japan has established that this juxtaposition of high
and low should more properly be called yatsushi, rather than mitate. I continue
to use the latter term, however, as more familiar to non-Japanese readers. See Asano
Shgo, Fry no zkei, nazoraeru ssaku: mitate to yatsushi to sono shuhen, in
Sat Yasuhiro, ed., Kza Nihon bijutsushi 3: zuz no imi (Tokyo: Tky daigaku shuppan-kai, 2005), pp. 205-236, and in English, Timothy T. Clark, Mitate-e: Some
Thoughts, and a Summary of Recent Writings, Impressions no. 19 (1997).
15
Andrew Markus, Prostitutes and Prosperity in the Works of Terakado Seiken, in Sumie Jones, ed., Imaging/Reading Eros, Proceedings from the Conference, Sexuality
and Edo Culture, 1750-1850, Indiana University, Bloomington, August 17-20, 1995 (The
East Asian Center, Indiana University, 1996), p. 37.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

391

Figure 12.2. Kuki Shz, The Structure of Iki, from Hiroshi Nara, ed., The Structure of
Detachment, p. 32.

centered around Nakamura Butsuan (1751-1835), which wrote a history of the early Yoshiwara in classical Chinese, along with humorous Chinese poems on related themes.16 In the Edo period, however,
this was all done as a learned joke. What Kuki has done is take that
same zoku content, and presented it in Taish-period ga, that is,
imported European philosophical discourse.
It may be that Kuki too originally conceived of his project in a
light-hearted vein.17 But it has been taken seriously by generations
of readers. What Kuki created was what I would call identity erot-

16
Robert Campbell, Poems on the Way to Yoshiwara, in Jones, Imaging/Reading Eros.
17
See J. Thomas Rimer, Literary Stances: The Structure of Iki, in Nara, Detachment.

392

joshua s. mostow

ics (from Jane Juffers identity erotica).18 But whereas identity

erotica is by definition for groups marginal to a mainstream, what
Kuki in fact achieved was a national erotics, that is, the use of
sexuality to define an ethnic culture. To the extent that Japan was
marginal to a mainstream European culture, of course, Kukis
national erotics was an identity erotics, and an exceptionalist one at
that. Kukis, then, was the first move in a version of Japanese exceptionalism (nihonjin ron) that is manifest today in the shunga boom,
or the fad for publishing reproductions of Edo-period visual
erotica.19
This turn to sexuality is part and parcel of the Taish period. As
Donald Roden shows, it was this era that saw a boom in the public
discourse on sexuality, such as Habuto Eiji and Sawada Junjirs
1915 Hentai Seiyoku Ron (The Theory of deviant sexual desire). But,
as Roden explains:
What started out as prescriptive literature quickly lost the blessings of
educators and police and thus descended into the underground culture,
where sexology thrived for most of the interwar period. Hentai seiyoku
(Deviant sexual desire) and Hentai shinri (Deviant psychology) were
among the half-dozen underground magazines that lavished attention
on variant sexuality in the late 1920s; and these were accompanied by
scores, perhaps hundreds, of independent books and articles. 20

This move to the psychological was intimately connected to German

philosophical concepts of culture, or Kultur. As Kurt Hiller declared:
culture can only be grasped subjectively through feeling and not
through logic.21 And surely the most subjective feeling could be
argued to be the erotic.
Interestingly enough, as we shall see, it is just the interiority of
erotic rapture that the ukiyo-e artists Utagawa Kuniyoshi and
18
Jane Juffer, At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York:
New York University Press, 1998).
19
In fact, Leslie Pincus claims that The Structure of Iki was not widely read in its
day, and that its elevation to the status of a classic only happened in the 1960s with
the rise of nihonjin ron. Nishiyamas writing on iki from 1930, quoted above, would
seem to be counter-evidence. On the shunga boom, see the Introduction in Joshua S.
Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill, eds., Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003).
20
Donald Roden, Taish Culture and the Problem of Gender Ambivalence,
in J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Inter-War
Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 46.
21
Roden, p. 40.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

393

Kunisada focussed on. Unlike Moronobus couples with their

archaic smiles, or Utamaros rapturous pairs, Kuniyoshi and
Kunisada often depict the woman in complete abandon, while her
partner seems much less swept away, or even almost entirely obscured
(Figure 12.3).22 I would like to offer a first reading of this image as
a metaphor: we might imagine that Kukis philosophical discourse
is the text surrounding the human figures, emphasizing the incommensurability and incommunicability of the (Japanese) womans jouissance.23 Here again, the Fukagawa geisha becomes the symbol of a
Japanese identity unavailable to rational understanding. In other
words, for Kuki, philosophical discourse exists only to demonstrate
the inviolability of a lived experience (Erlebnis).
3. Kuki, Iki, and the Homo-Erotic
Besides Kukis choice of Fukagawa of the Bunka-Bunsei eras as his
touchstone of ethnic identity, another conspicuous dissonance with
the past strikes us at the very beginning of Kukis intensional (naihteki) definition of iki: To begin with, in the intensional field, the first
feature of iki is coquetterie [bitai] towards the opposite sex (mazu
naih-teki kenchi ni atte, iki no dai-ichi no chhy wa isei ni tai suru bitai
de aru).24 The erotic allure of iki is, according to this definition, limited
to heterosexuality. This is very strange, and for two reasons. Malemale sex, and homosexual prostitution, were commonplace in the
Tokugawa periodby some estimates even as late as 1800 one quarter of all prostitutes were male. Limiting the concept of coquetterie to

22
Hayashi Yoshikazu and Richard Lane, Kuniyoshi: Hana-goyomi, Teihon Ukiyo-e
Shunga Meisaku Shsei 12 (Tokyo: Kawade Shob Shinsha, 1996), pp. 44-45.
23
Compare Nishiyama: Iki may be quite easily grasped experientially, but verbalizing this experience is difficult. . . verbal descriptions cannot fully convey a culture of feeling. . . (p. 53).
24
This hetero-normative definition appears in all three versions, though simpler
terms are used in preference to intentional.
Iki no honshitsu: Mazu iki wa sei-teki kankei o yos suru ishiki-gensh de i-sei ni tai
suru isshu no kobi mata wa bitai de aru (I: 93).
Shis version: Mazu iki no daiichi no chky wa i-sei ni tai suru bitai de aru
(Betsu: 57).
All quotations of Kukis writing are from Kuki Shz zensh, 12 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980-1982).

394

joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.3. Hayashi Yoshikazu and Richard Lane, Kuniyoshi: Hana-goyomi, Teihon Ukiyo-e

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

Shunga Meisaku Shsei 12 (Tokyo: Kawade Shob Shinsha, 1996), pp. 44-45.

395

396

joshua s. mostow

heterosexual encounters would have made no sense to someone of

the Bunka-Bunsei eras.
In fact, the topic of male homosexuality was prominent in the
Taish and early Shwa eras. Iwata Junichi was publishing his history of Japanese homo-eroticism, or nanshoku, from 1930 to 1933.25
And prominent authors, such as Edogawa Ranp, included clearly
homosexual characters in their fiction, such as Moroto Michio, the
co-protagonist of Ranps Kot no Oni (Demon of the solitary isle),
published serially from 1929-1930.26
It is also surprising to see Kuki insist on the heterosexual nature
of bitai given his own background. Born in the midst of the Meiji era
(1868-1912), Kuki was educated at the First Higher School, or Ichik,
at a time when the residential school was apparently rife with what
Roden calls homosexual predation.27 Homo-eroticism was not limited to predation, however. According to Roden, homosexual
activity was something which was publicly frowned upon though
privately tolerated. An article appearing in the Society of Friends Magazine in the fall of 1900 gently remonstrated the overzealous stalwarts
who entice our most beautiful boys with sweet words and then lead
them into that mysterious world.28 Nor was this homo-sociality or
homo-eroticism only between students. Nakano Hajime remarks in
his biographical sketch of Kuki:
In his academic training Kuki Shz encountered two teachers . . . The
first was Iwamoto Tei . . . His way of teaching was unconventional, and
his behaviour was also eccentric. He was moreover overfastidious about
adolescents, and it was also said that his criterion for choosing students
was based on their looks.
Kuki Shz had natural good looks; he immediately became the teachers pet and Iwamotos devotion to him was excessive. In Recollections
of First Higher School Life (collected in Watsuji Tetsurs Attempt at an
Autobiography), Watsuji presents the concrete facts in an expression of

25
See Tsuneo Watanabe and Junichi Iwata, The Love of the Samurai: a thousand
years of Japanese homosexuality (London: GMP Publishers Ltd., 1989).
26
Gregory M. Plugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 314-315; see
also Jeffrey M. Angles, Writing the Love of Boys: Representations of Male-Male Desire in the
Literature of Murayama Kaita and Edogawa Ranpo (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The
Ohio State University, 2003).
27
Donald Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan: A Study in the Culture of a Student Elite
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 141.
28
Roden, Schooldays, p. 142.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

397

disgust. Yet Iwamotos love for Kuki remained unchanged until his
death, and Kuki for his part speaks of Iwamoto with heartfelt esteem,
relating that he was taught a yearning for philosophy by him.29

What Kukis adult reaction was to the homo-eroticism that seems to

have surrounded him in his youth is difficult to saythe British poet
Robert Graves, for example, became militantly heterosexual after
his public school experiences (Good-Bye to All That). But what is evident is that the issue of homo-eroticism could not have been unknown
to Kuki. This makes it even more surprising that he should go out
of his way to falsify the historical record, and limit bitai to the heterosexual realm.30
4. Fukagawa and Haori Geisha
The second feature of iki is spirit (iki), in other words, pride (ikiji)
(iki no dai-ni no chhy wa iki sunawachi ikiji de aru). The first example that Kuki gives is the firefighters of Edo, and other male images.
But it soon becomes clear that for Kuki it is the Fukagawa geisha
who are the embodiment of iki.
Fukagawa was a long-running unlicensed quarter, contrasting with
the official bad area, Yoshiwara. Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton
explains: Cheaper pleasure quarters such as Fukagawa and Kiba
that catered to laborers existed in Edo before the end of the seventeenth century. By 1780, however, seven unlicensed areas developed
in Fukagawa alone. Iki, with a strong element of sexual allure in both
its coarse and its refined forms, could be appreciated by a broad

29
John Clark, trans., Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki by Kuki Shz
(Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), pp. 18-19. Pincus describes Iwamoto, the
schools German language teacher, as an eccentric character much revered by his
students despite a reputation for failing entire German language classes . . . According to the memoirs of Watsuji and others, Iwamotos punishments were strict, his
favoritism blatant, his teaching methods unconventional (p. 33). See Nakano Hajime, Kuki Shz, in Genron wa Nihon o ugokasu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kdansha,
1985-1985).
30
Another possible explanation would be Japanese laws against homosexuality at
the time, but in fact, as noted above, Iwata Juniichi was publishing his Honch nanshoku-k between 1930-33. Regardless, it would have been perfectly possible for Kuki
to discuss bitai without specifying it as hetero-sexual, and so leave the homosexual
possibility implicit or simply ignored, rather than explicitly denied.

398

joshua s. mostow

spectrum of people.31 The coarse aspect was represented by the

haori geisha, who wore a loose jacket (haori) over their kimono, creating a somewhat masculine effect, [and who] became synonymous
with iki.32
Kuki mentions only six ukiyo-e artists in his text: Okumura
Masanobu (1686-1764), Suzuki Harunobu (1724-1770), Torii Kiyomitsu (1735-1785), Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815), Kitagawa Utamaro
(1753-1806), and Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864). The first four are
all mentioned together at one point as examples that iki, however,
can be used to describe someone right after bathing.33 Yet, as
Hiroshi Nara notes:
The dates of their lives show clearly that, of all these artists, only Utamaro created images likely to bear witness to life in the Bunka and
Bunsei eras. Yet Utamaros prints, like those issued by the others, suggest nothing beyond the possibility that a woman fresh out of the bath
might be seen to embody iki, no matter how she dresses. None of these
printmakers dressed their women in a style that would answer to Kukis
description of iki.34

In fact, Utamaro was dead two years into the Bunka era, and while
Kiyonaga lived some ten years in it, he was dead three years before
the start of the Bunsei era.
Rather, it is in the works of the two main representatives of the
Utagawa school in their day, Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) and especially
Kunisada (1786-1864), that we find the brave haori geisha of Fukagawa.35 Particularly revealing is Kunisadas print The Competitive
31
Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton, The Women of the Pleasure Quarter: Japanese Painting
and Prints of the Floating World (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995), pp. 43-44.
32
Swinton, p. 42.
33
Translation Nara, p. 36; emphasis in the original. Note that the motif of yuagari
bijin (half-nude in bathrobe) became assimilated to Meiji/Taish painting. See Figure
9.8 in the chapter by Croissant and the reproduction of Utamaros print of a naked
woman entering the bathtub (Figure 10.3) in Berndts essay in this volume.
34
Nara, Detachment, pp. 111-112.
35
Kuki mentions Kunisada only once, and in what appears to be a derogatory
fashion:
Furthermore, given this linear relationship, we can also conceive of a situation
in which iki moves back toward amami sweet. Here the ikiji pride and honor and
the akirame resignation components of iki are lost and, as a result, only the sugary
sweetness remains, like that in the personality of an ordinary, pleasant person. The
women of Kunisada from Kiyonaga and Utamaro came into existence in this way
[sic] (trans. Nara, p. 31). For much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Kunisada and Kuniyoshi were characterized as decadents who works represented

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

399

Type (tate-hiki s) from his series A Contemporary Thirty-Two Types

(Tsei sanjni s), dated 1822-1823, right in the midst of Bunsei (Figure
12.4). Sebastian Izzard describes the print as follows:
. . . a young prostitute, holding a packet of all-purpose paper, crouches
beside her bedding and smiles as she talks to an unseen companion
[presumably a male customer]. The composition, as in many of
Kunisadas prints, is full of sexual innuendo. The collar of the womans
pale blue robe is decorated with a red and white tie-dyed (shibori) pattern. Her purple under-kimono has a pattern of maple leaves around
the hem and one of stylized cherry blossoms at the collar. Below this
she wears a pale blue robe with a white ivy-leaf pattern. A small patch
on the top of her head has been shaved in a mock-mannish style which,
along with the wearing of mens haori, or jackets, came into fashion
during the Bunsei era. Her hair is simply decorated with three tortoiseshell pins and a topknot tied with a pale blue cloth. The slightly disheveled hair, with strands coming loose at her brow, is a realistic touch,
as are the highly detailed eyelashes and eyebrows.36

From Izzard then we see that there were in fact two things that
marked a haori geisha: the wearing of a mans jacket, and also the
slight shaving of her crown. It is this second aspect to which we
should pay particular attention. Although young women and young
men (wakashu) as portrayed in ukiyo-e often look indistinguishable to
the untrained eye, in fact it is fairly rare when one is left in any
doubt. As can be seen in Moronobus prints, often the young man
will wear a short sword, or have one near him. But most often it is
the invariable rule that young men and women are distinguished by
the presence or absence of the sakayaki, that is, the shaving of the
pate. Yet in the Ka-sei era, women too began to affect this hairstyle,
imitating young men.
A Japanese catalogue entry gives us even more to consider about
this print:
Tate-hiku is to maintain ones pride or duty to the very end. It is to
have a chivalrous spirit (kyki/otokogi). As for the beautiful woman of
a decline from the peaks of Utamaro and Hokusai. Kuki was perhaps responding to
this prejudice.
On the other hand, he clearly approves of Kiyonaga: Expression pertaining to
the entire body can symbolize iki by means of a physical movement, namely, relaxing the body slightly. This mode of expression is captured with astonishing sensitivity in prints of all kinds by Torii Kiyonaga (trans. Nara, p. 35; emphasis in the
original).
36
Sebastian Izzard, Kunisadas World (New York: Japan Society, 1993), p. 83.

400

joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.4. Kunisada, The Competitive Type (tate-hiki s) from the series A Contemporary Thirty-Two Types (Tsei sanjni s), dated 1822-1823. Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, Philipp Franz von Siebold Collection. A color plate of this illustration
can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

401

this impressive picture with her sidelocks jutting out grandly to the left
and right, based on the wild goose (karigane) crest on a part of her
collar, we are led to imagine that she might be a prostitute posing as
a female Robin Hood (onna-date), who has been likened (mi-tateta) to the
knight of the town (otoko-date) Karigane Bunshichi. Karigane Bunshichi was a knight of the town who appeared in such plays as the
puppet-play Knights of the Town Five Wild Geese (Otoko-date Itsutsu
Karigane) and the kabuki play In Stock Soga Wild Geese-Dyed (Shi-ire
Soga Karegane-zome), and had an influence on the later play White
Waves Five Men (Shiranami Gonin Otoko).37

This last, famous play, still performed today, is best known for its
section called Benten the Thief. In Samuel Leiters description:
Posing as the daughter of a Nikaid clan samurai and her attendant,
Benten, accompanied by Nang, allows himself to be discovered shoplifting at the Hamamatsuya, a textile shop, where the girl presumably
is shopping for a trousseau. Benten is injured by a clerk, who strikes
him on the forehead and creates a scar. Nang demands 100 ry in
recompense. The powerful samurai Tamashima Itt just happens to
be present and sees through Bentens female disguise. Benten and
Nang confess, and each delivers a famous speech announcing his true
name. . . the seated Benten thrusts his arm out. . . When he open his
kimono to reveal a mans body covered with beautiful tattoos, the scene
takes on an erotic (or homoerotic) quality associated with late Edo
kabuki.38

In other words, Kunisadas figure suggests something of a female

tough, and such female gallantsusually the leaders of a group
of men who rescued the poor and innocent from violencewere a
staple of the sentimental fiction, or ninjbon, of Tamenaga Shunsui,
whose most famous work, Shunshoku Ume-goyomi, is the single most
cited Edo-period text in Kukis Structure of Iki. Ume-goyomi was illustrated by Yanagawa Shigenobu (1787-1832) in the last year of his
life. His pictures of O-ch/Chkichi, one of the two main female
characters in this tale, show how masculine a look was affected by
some of the young women of Fukagawa (Figure 12.5). The behavior
of women in Fukagawa is depicted in Kunisadas Shunshoku Hatsune
no Ume of 1842, which shows a yoseba, or gathering place for profes-

37
[Suzuki Jz], Kunisada~bijin-ga o chshin ni~ (Tokyo: Seikad Bunko, 1996),
p. 114.
38
Samuel L. Leiter, New Kabuki Encyclopedia, A Revised Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten
(Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 17.

402

joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.5. Yanagawa Shigenobu, Shunshoku Ume-goyomi (1833) Take Chkichi.

Reproduced from Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 64 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten,
1962), p. 43.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

403

sional entertainers such as geisha. As a geisha casually climbs the

stairs completely naked, her co-workers are molesting a young errand
boy (Figure 12.6).39
Tough and/or sexually aggressive women also populate Kuniyoshis work. Let us start with images that have no accompanying
text. There is Edo Murasaki Yoshiwara Genji, a work obviously meant
to compete with the highly popular Inaka Genji of Kunisada (Figure
12.7).40 Here we see two women engaging a man, one with a clearly
shaved pate literally climbing up his torso to kiss him, while her
companion inserts the mans organ from the rear. Words only make
things clearerhere in a scene from Azuma-buri (Eastern Style, that
is, Edo), we see a couple folding up beddingthe man with a pipe
in his mouth, the woman with her legs wide, exposing her crotch,
and the floor littered with used tissuestestament to an active night.
The dialogue reads in part (Figure 12.8):
Man: Last night once I got back, your pussy sure was hot
Woman: For me too, when I put you inside me, my breast beat
wildly . . .
Man: Were both such great lovers.41

Kuniyoshi in fact illustrated at least one erotic novel by Shunsui

himself, Hana-goyomi, and here too we see the plucky women who
were matched to the dashing firefighters and who exemplified iki
(Figure 12.9).42
It is important to note that not all these women are haori geisha per
se. As seen in the four female characters of Shunsuis Shunshoku Umegoyomi, iki could be embodied in the highest-ranking courtesans, onnadate, and other professional women who did not necessarily affect
the fashion of the haori geisha.
Nonetheless, it is not simply a matter of plucky or sexually aggressive womenimages that exhibit extreme gender ambiguity also
populate these works. Again, the clearest examples are from the
Shunj Kidan Mizu-age-ch of Kunisada and Tanehiko. Here (Figure
39
Chris Uhlenbeck and Margarita Winkel, Japanese Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagery
of the Edo Period (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005), p. 194, plate 74b.
40
Yasuda Yoshiaki, Edo o Yomu 3: Kuniyoshi (Tokyo: Futami Shob, 1996),
pp. 12-13.
41
Yasuda Yoshiaki, Makura-e no Onna, Mitsuz no Meisaku Ehon 3 (Tokyo: Futami Shob, 1989), pp. 52-53.
42
Hayashi and Lane, Kuniyoshi: Hana-goyomi, pp. 28-29.

Figure 12.6. Kunisada, Shunshoku Hatsune no Ume, 1842. From Chris Uhlenbeck and Margarita Winkel, Japanese
Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005), p. 194, plate 74b.

404
joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.7. Kuniyoshi, Edo Murasaki Yoshiwara Genji, from Yasuda Yoshiaki, Edo o Yomu 3: Kuniyoshi (Tokyo: Futami
Shob, 1996), pp. 12-13.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

405

Figure 12.8. Kunisada, Azuma-buri, from Yasuda Yoshitaka, Makura-e no Onna, Mitsuz no meisaku ehon 3
(Tokyo: Futami Shob, 1989), pp. 52-53.

406
joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.9. Kuniyoshi, Hana-goyomi, Hayashi and Lane, Kuniyoshi: Hana-goyomi, pp. 28-29.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

407

408

joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.10 left. Kunisada, Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, O-Haru and Mizukichi. Edo
meisaku enpon (Tokyo: Gakken, 1996). A color plate of this illustration can be found
in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

Figure 12.10 right.

409

410

joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.11 left. Kunisada, Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, Chkichi pouring sake.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

Figure 12.11 right.

411

412

joshua s. mostow

12.10), for instance, we have an image of the young O-Haru, who

as a rental shamisen-player has not only shaved her pate, but cut
her hair short in the boy-fashion affected by these entertainersjust
as seen with O-Ch in Shunsuis Shunshoku Ume-goyomi. Even more
confounding is the minor character Chkichi, first seen at the beginning of Book III serving sak (Figure 12.11), who in the final scene
of the work is revealed by the lascivious serving woman O-Sen to be
a girl, whereupon O-Zeni then equips her with a dildo (Figure 12.12)!
In a somewhat similar fashion, we see what seems to be a real violation of sexual norms in Kuniyoshis Edo Murasaki Yoshiwara Genji (Figure 12.13), where a customer in a kabuki theater dressing-room is
being serviced not by a kagema or young onnagatathat is, female
impersonatorbut rather by a mature male actor (playing the role
of the hero Fukashichi from the play Imoseyama Onna Teikin), while
the onnagata attends to his own make-up.43 As a last example from a
great number, we have the image (Figure 12.14) from Kunisadas
Hoshi-tsuki yo-iri no shirabe, or Song of Entering a Night of the Moon and
Stars, where a couple is about to have sex while sharing a dream
about a young apprentice being abused by his master.44
What I believe all this shows us is that the Ka-sei era was one of
exceptional gender ambiguity, even by Tokugawa-period standards.
In this regard, it resonated with the Taish period and the 1920s,
also known for their extreme gender ambiguity. One may ask, however, whether Kuki would have been familiar with the kind of erotic
prints I have been using here. I think we can safely assume that he
was, for a number of reasons. First, as I mentioned, his father was
a major figure in the world of art administration. Moreover, as a
wealthy habitu of the Gion pleasure quarter, Kuki would have
almost inevitably seen these kinds of works, and most probably
owned some himself. We may surmise a reference to such works in
the following words of his, from the essay Propos sur le temps, written
in 1928:
Les choses honteuses et rpugnantes au point de vue moral taient parfois le sujet des
estampes de la priode Tokugawa (1600-1850). Avec quelle ardeur pure et sereine

43

For a further analysis of this image, see Uhlenbeck and Winkel, p. 207.
Yoshizaki Junji, Edo Shunga Seiai Makura-e Kenky (Tokyo: Kosumikku Intnashonaru, 2004), p. 159.
44

Figure 12.12. Kunisada, Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, Chkichi and O-Sen.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

413

Figure 12.13. Kuniyoshi, Edo Murasaki Yoshiwara Genji, Kabuki dressing-room. From Chris Uhlenbeck and Margarita
Winkel, Japanese Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005), p. 207, plate
80b.

414
joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.14. Kunisada, Hoshi-tsuki Yo-iri no Shirabe, from Yoshizaki Junji, Edo shunga: seiai makura-e kenky (Tokyo:
Kosumikku shuppan, 2004), p. 159.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

415

416

joshua s. mostow
sont-elles traites! On se trouve ainsi avoir pratiqu, depuis plusieurs sicles, la thorie de lart pour lart, cette thorie de lidalisme absolu dans lart.45
[Things that are shameful and repugnant from a moral point of view
are sometimes the subject of prints from the Tokugawa period (16001850). With what pure and serene ardor are they treated! We find that
we have thus been practicing, for several centuries, the theory of art-forarts sake, that theory of absolute idealism in art.46]

What Kuki is doing is yet another form of mitate, comparing the

Taish and Ka-sei eras. Yet this comparison is repressed, and its
fundamental sexual ambiguity replaced by hyper-normative gender
distinctions. In other words, we must suspect that Kuki was attracted
to the Ka-sei era precisely because it was a time of intense gender
ambiguity that matched his own experience of the European 1920s
and Japanese Taish era. Yet the similarity of these two periods did
not lead him to embrace his era and its Modern Girl (moga). In
Pincuss words:
. . . how could Kuki have noted the social and political implications
of the carnal cast of Edo culture when he was in flight from realities
of the same order in his own time? For this early Shwa thinker, culture had come to mean the denial of the social sphere, not its expression.47

On one hand, then, Kuki seized upon a period in early modern

Japan that had many parallels to his own day. On the other hand,
he actually obscures the gender and sexual ambiguities of the Ka-sei
era, by ignoring its homosexual practices and the overt cross-dressing
practices of the haori geisha. What is he up to?
There is little doubt that Kuki was a cultural elitist who was greatly
troubled by and in flight from the burgeoning popular culture of the
1920s. In an essay written in French, Kuki commences thus:
Jusque 1868, lanne de la rvolution, nous avions quatre castes: les chevaliers, les
cultivateurs, les artisans, les marchands. Notre idal moral tait la voie des chevaliers se constituant, avant tout, en vaillance, en noblesse de lme et en gnrosit.
Les marchands, le dernire des castes, subirent un mpris excessif. Pour en donner un
exemple dans la litrature, Turayuki, pote et critique du Xe sicle, en parlant des vers

45

Zensh I: 278.
Translation, with modifications, from Doris Croissant, Icons of Femininity:
Japanese National Painting and the Paradox of Modernity, in Mostow et al., eds.,
Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, p. 135.
47
Pincus, p. 129.
46

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

417

compos de jolis mots qui ne correspondent pas la matire, les compara un marchand habill de beaux vtements. Ce mpris des marchands et du commerce est sans
doute injuste, tous les points de vue. Pourtant jose fliciter, tout prendre, cet ordre
des castes que nous avions jadis, puisquil a servi former, nettement, lidal de notre
pays. Maintenant quil nexiste plus, lidal moral le survit. Aussi nous sommes
nourris et nous avons grandi dans une atmosphere, loin des comptoirs, loin des boutiques.48
[Until 1868, the year of the revolution, we had four castes: the knights,
the farmers, the artisans, the merchants. Our moral ideal was the way
of the knights which consisted of, above all else, valor, nobility of spirit, and generosity. The last of the castes, the merchants, suffered excessive contempt. To give one example from literature, Tsurayuki, poet
and critic of the tenth century, while speaking of verses composed of
pretty words that do not correspond to the theme, compares them to a
merchant clothed in beautiful garments. This contempt for merchants
and commerce is without a doubt unjust, from any point of view. Nevertheless, I dare celebrate, in the main, this order of castes that we had
in the past, since it served to form, clearly, the ideals of our country.
And while it no longer exists, the moral ideal survives. Thus we have
been nurtured and raised in an atmosphere far from counting-houses
and shops.49]

Michael Marra, in discussing another section of this short essay (he

does not make reference to the paragraph above) claims that Kukis
reaction. . . was not simply a hypocritical rhetorical outburst by a
privileged member of Japans high society,50 but this is precisely
what it in fact was. Not only was it elitist, but it was also misogynistic, since Taish popular culture was fueled by and directed at the
largely female consumer of the new emerging middle- and lowermiddle classes.
Like Kaf and Tanizaki, Kuki went running back to the Edo
period. But in another curious contradiction, he immersed himself
not in the warrior-code of bushido as he suggested in the paragraph
just quoted, but rather precisely in a form of low popular culture
directed specifically at women, the sentimental fiction of ninj-bon.
And yet, he did not, as far as we know, engage in the kind of selfdenigrating behavior that we see with Kaf in the company of the

48

Zensh I: 249.
It should be noted that Kukis reference to Tsurayuki is completely anachronistic since warriors were completely looked down upon by the aristocracy of the
Heian period.
50
Marra, Kuki Shz, p. 28.
49

418

joshua s. mostow

very lowest class of prostitutes, nor did he give voice to the kind of
male masochism that is such a strong motif in Tanizakis work.
Nonetheless, Kuki turned to the Edo-period genre of ninj-bon, which
celebrated the passionate love of the Fukagawa geisha and other
professional women, the passion that gave them their allure and their
pluck, that is, their iki.51
In the final note to The Structure of Iki, Kuki explores all the homonyms of the word iki: The etymology of the word iki must be
elucidated ontologically along with its relationship to such words as
iki life, living iki breath, breathing, iki going, and iki pride
and honor.52 Here again, Kuki represses the obvious, since iki also
means jouissance. And in the shunga of Kunisada and Kuniyoshi we
see a virtual celebration of the joissance of the women, as we saw in
Kunisadas Hana-goyomi (Figure 12.3), or again in his Mizu-age-ch
(Figure 12.15), where a man is manipulating a woman to ecstacy. 53
This image now suggests a second reading, no longer exclusively
focused on the woman but including the man, a metaphor now for
Kukis very project: the objective, philosophical male and the ecstatic
woman, together asserting the uniqueness of Japanese lived experience (Erlebenis), as described and depicted by a Japanese male. Such
a metaphoranalogous to the tantric Buddhist concept of the Womb
and Diamond Mandala, or the Tibetan yab-yum representations of a
male bodhisattva in union with his dkinwould not be foreign to
Kuki, who makes constant reference to Buddhist philosophy and
non-dualism in his writings.
Yet, rather than seeing the surrounding text as insisting on the
incommensurability of experience to discourse, I think it encouraged
Kuki in his ethno-centric linguistic exercise. Kuki starts his entire
discussion in Iki no Kz with an insistence on the co-extensive
51
And while there are forceful males in these talesthe samurai who appear at
the end, deus ex machina, and engineer a happy ending for all the protagoniststhe
male lead is an iro-otoko, or playboy, who has neither money nor strength. . . and
simply waits for others to meet his needs. He is always physically weak, except in
sexual prowess. Another word to describe him, himo (hanger-on), indicates a fellow
whose lovers support and coddle him. Alan S. Woodhull, Romantic Edo Fiction: A
Study of the Ninjobon and Complete Translation of Shunshoku Umegoyomi (Unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1978), p. 30.
52
Nara, Detachment, p. 91.
53
Ud Yoshihiko, ed., (Edo Meisaku Ehon) Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch (Tokyo: Gakken, 1996), 7-ch ura, 8-ch omote. See also Amano Ukihashi, and Kuniyoshis Yoshiwara
Genji and Azuma-buri.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

419

nature of language and ethnicity: . . . language represents none

other than the manifestation of an ethnic groups past and present
modes of being. . . .54
I am reminded of the epigraph to an article, Introduction to the
Study of the Interjection by Sergej Karcevskij (1884-1955), who
studied in Switzerland and brought the theories of his teacher, Ferdinand de Saussure, back home to Russia just about a decade before
Kukis foreign study.55 Karcevskijs epigraph is from a novel by
Dumas pre and reads: Aha! he cried in Portuguese. Karcevskij
starts his article by admitting that the quote seems ridiculoussurely
the cries of surprise or disgust are pretty much the same in all languagesbut he then goes on to demonstrate that, in fact, such elements must also conform to the specifics of any particular languages
phonology.56 In the same way, with images such as Kuniyoshis and
Kunisadas (Figures 12.3 and 12.15) in mind, might not Kuki have
been insisting that orgasms too are phonologically and ethnically
restricted? Indeed, the dialogue of such prints often resolves itself
into a series of ejaculations such as, aafun aafun, or aa aa suu
suu fun fun fun.
5. Resignation (akirame) and War
The third and final element of Kukis definition of iki is akirame, or
resignation.57 Kuki insisted that iki depended on protecting the
possibility of a possibility,58 and disappears when the tension necessary for coquetry is lost. This denial of jouissance would seem to be
the last in the long list of denials and suppressions that we have
traced in Kukis thought. We must suspect that in reality, Kuki is
54

Nara, Detachment, p. 14.

Peter Steiner, ed., The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), p. 47.
56
Introduction ltude de linterjection, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure I (Geneva,
1941).
57
Nishiyama, basing his definition on both the work of Kuki and As Isoji, gives
the three elements of iki as bitai, hari, and akanuke. Hari was a sharp, straightforward,
coolly gallant manner that resisted all compromise, conciliation, and undue social
adroitness or tact. The quality of akanuke demanded an unpretentious air, a thorough familiarity with all aspects of life, and an unconcerned, unassuming character
(p. 54). As can be seen, akirame plays no role in this definition.
58
Nara, Detachment, p. 19.
55

420

joshua s. mostow

Figure 12.15 left. Kunisada, Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, O-Kimi and Kinosuke. A color
plate of this illustration can be found in the color section on pp. xvii-xxxii.

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

Figure 12.15 right.

421

422

joshua s. mostow

founding Japanese identity on the ecstasy of the Fukagawa geisha,

and insisting that her orgasm constitutes a kind of ethnic prsence. In
both the shunga of the period and the ninj-bon, there is no abstinence:
Yonehachi and Tanjir make love in the very first chapter of Shunsoku
Ume-goyomi, and we can see that the visual erotica shows no reticence.
We may not know how Kuki behaved with his courtisanes in Paris or
geisha in Gion, but in Fukagawa women celebrated their love and
passion.59
Kuki suppresses the excess and gender ambiguity of the Fukagawa
prostitutes so that his own lumping together of men and women
under his three concepts of bitai, ikiji, and akirame will not have any
obvious destabilizing effects. That is to say that Kuki insists that both
the prostitute and the male habitu of the Quarter can be characterized as having sexual allure, pluck, and resignation. And
clearly in, for instance, the kabuki play Sukeroku, both the eponymous
hero and his lover, the courtesan Agemaki, show that they can flirt
and be brash and bold. But it is precisely on the third termresignationthat this shell-game is being played.
Kuki claims that akirame, a kind of disinterested interest, is essential to bitai and iki: only if the game is never consummated does it
remain chic. In fact he quotes Kaf: there is nothing more pathetic
than having a woman after trying to have the woman.60 But can
the resignation of both the prostitute and her customer really be
the same thing? The habitu (ts) manifests his chic by treating
love in the Quarter as a game, and never losing his heart to a prostitute. Yet for the prostitute, her resignation is in accepting that
no customer will ever truly fall in love with her and redeem her from
her sexual slavery.61 The game, as the Shikid Okagami makes quite
clear, is for each party to try to get the other to fall truly in love,

59
It should go without saying that I am not discussing here actual, real Fukagawa
prostitutes, but rather the representation of them in verbal and visual texts. Indeed,
Cecilia Segawa Seigle claims that courtesans in general both avoided shunga and
were trained to resist climaxing. See her The Decorousness of the YoshiwaraA
Rejection of Shunga, in Uhlenbeck and Winkel, eds., Japanese Erotic Fantasies,
pp. 35-48.
60
Nara, Detachment, p. 19.
61
In fact, Nishiyama suggests that iki was the aesthetic consciousness typified by
courtesans (yjo) and female geisha; the model of ts, by contrast, was found among
pleasure seekers who actively fostered the development of ikithat is, the men who
frequented the pleasure districts (p. 60).

utagawa shunga, kukis chic

423

while not doing so themselves. In a society where prostitution is legal,

there is little cachet in being able to buy anothers body. What the
ts was after was to get the professional lover to lose her self-defense
and to fall in love with her customer. For the womans part, the love
of a wealthy patron was her only ticket out of her indentured servitude. It was this dynamic that led to shinj, or the constantly escalating forms of self-immolation that were used to convince one party
(usually the patron) of the others sincerity (usually the woman): cutting off hair, ripping off finger-nails, cutting off fingers and, ultimately, promises of double suicide.62
Akirame will have even more profound implications in the late
1930s and early 40s as Japan militarizes. One might like to believe
that Kukis participation in the construction of the militaristic ideology of the Shwa era was somehow pro forma or coerced, but in fact
in another essay he published while in France, LAme japonaise, he
approvingly quoted the poem Umi yukaba,63 which would become
the most popular song in Japanese war-time propaganda, and he
then goes on to defend the suicide of General Nogi as a noble example of offering ones life for ones emperor. As Pincus has explained,
in 1937 Kuki published an essay entitled Nihon-teki Seikaku ni tsuite,
or Concerning the Japanese Character, which, like Iki no Kz
62
See Lawrence Rogers, She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not: Shinj and Shikid
kagami, Monumenta Nipponica 49, no. 1 (Spring 1994); and Joshua S. Mostow, The
Gender of Wakashu and the Grammar of Desire, in Mostow, Bryson, and Graybill,
Gender and Power.
63
In Kukis French translation:

En allant par mer

Mon corps dans leau,
En allant par monts
Mon coprs sous les herbes,
Laisse-moi mourir
A ct du roi! (KSZ I: 252)
A more accurate rendition is:
If we go to sea, corpses in a watery grave,
If we go to the mountains, grass-twined corpses,
We will die near our great lord,
We will not die peacefully. (An alternate last line is: We will not look back.)
Umi yukaba, as printed in Nihon gunkash: Umi yukaba/ mizuku kabane/ Yama yukaba/
kusa musu kabane/ gimi no he ni koso shiname/ nodo ni wa shinaji. The Manysh poem
ends with a different final line: kaerimi wa seji, we will not look back. See Sharalyn
Orbaugh, Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity (Brill, 2007),
p. 229.

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joshua s. mostow

was published in the journal Shis.64 In this essay, the resignation of

the plucky prostitute is replaced by bushido and the necessary willingness of all subjects of the Japanese empire to sacrifice themselves
to the national cause and the emperor. Demonstrations of loyalty to
a customer have become self-immolation for the emperor. As I have
written elsewhere, the model for imperial subjectivity became unrequited love, with the emperor cast as the absent lover, and the imperial subject exemplified by the neglected women of the Heian-era
imperial harem.65 For all of its supposed playfulness, then, bordello
chic ultimately was bound for the battlefield.

64

Pincus, Kuki Shz, pp. 221-228.

Joshua S. Mostow, Nihon no Bijutsushi Gensetsu to Miyabi, [Art historical discourse in Japan and courtliness], in Tokyo kokuritsu bunkazai kenkyjo, eds., Kataru genzai katarareru kako: Nihon no bijutsushi 100-nen [The Present that Tells, The Past
that is Told of: 100 Years of Art History in Japan] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1999),
pp. 232-239.
65

contributors

425

CONTRIBUTORS
Jaqueline Berndt Ph. D. (Dr. phil.) in Aesthetics/Art Theory (Humboldt University Berlin, 1991); Associate Professor for Art Sociology,
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan (1995-2001); and, since 2001,
Associate Professor for Art and Media Studies, Yokohama National
University. Her fields of expertise are aesthetics/art theory and Japanese Studies and her research interests include the aesthetics of
comics, art history, and contemporary visual culture.
Doris Croissant is senior professor of East Asian art history at the
University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has published on funeral
art and portraiture in China, Rinpa painting, the concepts of realism
and photography in Japan, and more recently, the gender discourse
of native aesthetics in Japanese art and popular culture.
John Fitzgerald works in the field of modern Chinese history with a
special focus on political and diaspora histories. His most recent book
is Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney, 2007).
His contribution to the present volume was written while he was
Head of the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in
Melbourne. He currently serves as China Representative of the Ford
Foundation in China.
Ikeda Shinobu is a Professor in the Department of History at Chiba
University, Japan. She is also the author of Nihon kaiga no joseizjend
bijutsushi no shiten kara (The Image of Women in Japanese Painting
from the viewpoint of gender art history) (Tokyo: Chikuma shob,
1998).
Joan Judge is most recently the author of The Precious Raft of History:
The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University
Press, 2008) and of a number of articles on women in turn-of-thetwentieth-century China. She is an Associate Professor in the Division of Humanities and the School of Womens Studies at York
University, Toronto, Canada.

426

contributors

Ayako Kano is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian

Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, where
she is also affiliated with programs in Womens Studies, Comparative
Literature & Literary Theory, Theater Arts, Folklore & Folklife, Cinema Studies, and History. Her publications include Acting Like a
Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (Palgrave,
2001) and journal articles as well as translations in the areas of feminism and performance studies.
Keith McMahon received his B.A. in French and Comparative Literature from Indiana University, his M.A. in Chinese from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Chinese from Princeton University. He has
taught at the University of Kansas since 1984, where he has been
Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures since
1996. Recently he has written on opium smoking and modern subjectivity, polygyny and sexuality in China on the verge of modernity,
and the history of imperial marriage in dynastic China.
Joshua S. Mostow is Professor of Asian Studies at The University of
British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). He is also co-editor, with
Norman Bryson and Maribeth Graybill, of Gender and Power in the
Japanese Visual Field (Hawaii, 2003).
Tze-lan D. Sang teaches modern Chinese literature and culture at the
University of Oregon. She is the author of The Emerging Lesbian: Female
Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (California, 2003). She is currently
writing a book on popular literature and urban culture in early-twentieth-century China.
Tomi Suzuki is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at Columbia
University. She is the author of Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese
Modernity (Stanford, 1996; Japanese edition, 2000; Korean edition,
2004) and the author and co-editor of Inventing the Classics: Modernity,
National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford, 2000; Japanese edition, 1999; Korean edition, 2002). She is currently completing a book
on gender and literary modernism in Japan.
Melanie Trede has been professor for the histories of Japanese art at
the University of Heidelberg since 2004, and has taught at Columbia

contributors

427

University and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She is the author of
Image, Text and Audience: The Taishokan Narrative in Visual Representations
of the Early Modern Period in Japan (2003) and is currently completing
a book project entitled Interventions in the Political Iconography of Pictorial
Narratives. Research interests and publications include the fields of
pictorial narratives, gender and art histories, art historiography and
terminology, collecting histories, and the lives of Japanese paintings.
Catherine Vance Yeh is an Associate Professor at Boston University. Her
research interests are presently in twentieth century Chinese entertainment culture, its political implications and its impact on social
change. Her recent publications include Shanghai Love: Courtesan, Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910 (Seattle, 2005). She is currently finishing a book manuscript on the Chinese political novel of
the early twentieth century, and is concurrently working on a project
with the working title The Stuff Stars are Made of: Politics, Mass
Media, and the Rise of dan Actors during the Republic Era 1910s1930s).

428

contributors

index

429

INDEX
Numbers in bold italics refer to illustrations.
actors, see Kabuki, and Peking
opera
actresses, 220, 241-261; see also Japanese
theater
Adam and Eve, 41
Aestheticism: 9, aesthetic life, 167; art,
305, 359; avant-garde, 381; era, 249,
267, 276; European movement, 144,
174, 175; decadence, 13, 14, 167, 267,
281, 304; fin-de-sicle revolutionaries,
166; homosexuality, 396; intellectuals,
279; judgment, 266; Kansai artists,
294; Taish aestheticism (tanbi shugi),
301
Ai Xia, 180
Ajanta Cave, 279, 280
Akadama Port Wine: 337, 339, 344, n.
50; Akadama Port Wine Poster, 308, 310,
334, 336, 337, 338, 341, 342; revue,
337
Akazomeemon, 152
Akita Ujaku, 246
Akutagawa Rynosuke, 372
Alt Heidelberg, 244-246, 248
Amao guniang, see Lass Amao, The
Amaterasu (sun goddess), 64, 97, 220,
221, 386
Amazon, 56, 85, 103
Amazon, An, 356, 357, 358
Amida (Amitabha) Buddha, 68, 270
Anderson, Benedict, 2, 55
Ang Lee, 197
Angell Treaty, 27, 28
Angles, Jeffrey Matthews, 297
Antiquarian League (Tankikai), 390
army (Japanese), 81, 85, 281
Art Theater (Geijutsuza), 243, 251, n. 22;
troupe, 254
Asahi Newspaper (Shinbun-sha), 266, n.
6, 342
Asai Ch, 337
Ashikaga Yoshinori (shogun), 68
Asian Values school, 22
Asian Venus, 279, 282

Asian world-spirit, 383

Association for the Creation of National
Painting (Kokuga ssaku kykai): 12,
13, 267, 276, 279; decadent pure
art, 298; exhibitions, 283, 298, 283,
287, 294; founding member, 297,
n. 63; painter, 277, 298; society, 282,
294; yga section, 298
Association of Chinese Women Students
in Japan (Zhongguo liu Ri n xuesheng
hui), 126
At the Crossing, 369, 371
Australian Chinese colonists, 27
Awakening of Japan, The, 385
Azuma-buri, see Eastern Style
Baihua, see Vernacular [Journal]
bakufu, see samurai government
Balibar, Etienne, 20
Bank of China: 217; chief of, 229
Banknote Bureau, 91
banknotes: Japan, 55-104, 58, 59, 60,
86, 92; United States, 88; Australian
notes, 63; Canadian, 63; Continental
Banknote Company, 87
baomu, see primary care givers
Barlow, Tani E., 20, 52, 186, 187
bath-house girl (yuna), 298
Bathing Beauty (Nyyoku bijin zu), 316, 317
Baudelaire, Charles, 174, 384
Beardsley, Aubrey, 304, 360
Beautiful woman (bijin): 266, 304, 306, 320,
337, 341, 342; Meiji, 271; Western
stereotype of the belle, 360; bijin-e
(Ukiyoe pictures of beauties), 316; bijinga (bijin-painting as painting genre),
266, 301, 304, 333, 334; beauties after
bathing (yuagari bijin), 323, 398
Beautiful, New Chinese Woman, A, 367, 368
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 165
Beijing Daily (Beijing ribao), 118
Beijing: 130, 186, 192-194, 197, 217, 227;
Haidian suburb of, 198
Bellamy, Edward, 34

430

index

Ben no Tsubone, 152

Benten, the Thief (Benten koz), 401
Bergson, Henri, 383
Bigot, Georges, 318, 319, 326
bijin, see Beautiful women
bijin-e, pictures of beauties, see Beautiful woman
bijin-ga (bijin-painting), see Beautiful
woman
Bijutsu hyron, 322
Bijutsu shinsetsu, see Truth of Fine Arts,
The
Bing Xin, 190, n. 25
bitai (coquetterie), see bordello chic
Blue Stockings (Seit), 173, 243-244, 255,
282
Board of Education (Xuebu), 108, 109,
110, 118
Bodhisattva: 74, 279, 281; gender of,
100, 268-275; Kannon (sanskr. Avalokitevara, Chin.Guanyin), 268, 274;
Kannon as Bodhisattva of Mercy,
99, 267, 270, 271, 273-275, 277,
305; Kanzeon Bosatsu, 277; Gyran
Kannon (Kannon with Fish Basket),
274, 275; thirty-three manifestations
of Kannon, 271; Maria-Kannon, 271;
as prostitute, 274; Padmapani Avalokitevara, 279, 280; Seishi (Mahsthmaprpta), 270; yab-yum (Tibetan),
sexual union of Avalokitevara and
yakshini, 418
Book of Odes (Shijing), 109
Book of Rites (Liji), see Confucianism
Book of Tea, The, 383
bordello chic (iki): coquetterie (bitai), 393,
396, 397; iki, 12, 383, 384, 390, 393,
403, 422; homonymns, 418; Kuki
Shzs definition of iki, 393; pride
(ikiji) 397; resignation (akirame), 419;
sexual allure, 397; spirit, chivalrous
of, (kyki/ otokogi), 399
Botchan, 275
Boxer Protocols, 44
Boys Festival (gosekku): 77, 79; paraphernalia, 93
Bray, Francesca, 40
brothel: China, 117, 138; Japan, 386;
Shanghai, 135, 136, 139
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 152, 165
Bryson, Norman, 314, 341
bu, see martial bravery

Buddha of Art (Frybutsu), 156, n. 27

Buddhism: angels (tennin), 289; Indian art,
279; concepts of transgender, 267;
deities, 99; heavenly maidens (tenj),
271; trinities (sanzon), 323
Bulletin of National History (Kokushi kiy),
94, 95, 98
bun, see refined culture
Bungakukai, 165
Bungei kurabu, see Literary Club
Bungei kykai, see Literary Art Society
bunjinga, see literati painting
Bunka and Bunsei eras (or Ka-sei-ki):
383, 385, 398, 399, 416; gender ambiguity, 412; Fukagawa, 393; sexuality, 396
Bunsh dokuhon, see Manual of Style
Bunsh sekai, 166
Bunten, Salon of the Ministry of Culture,
see Exhibitions
Burnett, Frances, 157
bushid, see Way of the warrior
Bust of the Beautiful Young Salaino, 297
Butterfly novels, 10; Butterfly heroine, 322
Cai Yuanpei, 36
Campbell, Robert, 390
Carnal Prayer Mat (Roupu tuan), 149
Carpenter, Edward, 281, 282
Casino Folies, 260
Chance Meeting with Beautiful Women (Kajin
no kig), 156
Change ben yue, see Change flying to the
moon
Change flying to the moon (Change ben
yue), 227, 231
Chefoo Convention, 25
Chen Yongsheng, 130
Chen Yuzi, 193, 194, 195
Cheng Changgeng, 215
Chi Kan J, see Wisdom Impression
Sentiment
Chiang Kai-shek, 185
Chiba Kei, 97, 100, 271, 275
chic, see bordello chic (iki)
Chikanobu, 389
China: empire: 35, 135; government of,
239; Japans China as other, 347,
348, 373, 381; Japans colonization
of, 348, 381; nation state (guojia);

index
24, New Culture Movement, 48, 51,
52; radical nationalist movement, 12;
Republic, 44, 105, 113, 117, 120, 129,
130, 142, 199, 205, 208, 215, 217,
236, 237; resistance against Japan,
372; republican motherhood, 132;
republican reform, 220; revolution,
46, 205, 220
Chinese dress (shinafuku), 347-381
Chinese learning: classics, 109; in Japan,
(kangaku), 123; literati, 41, 42; social
classes and categories (deng, rending ),
32, 37; ways, ancient, (guli), 118
Chinese literature: heroic and grand (ys
gitsu), 176; Ming, 136, 160; Ming
vernacular fiction, 15; modern , 48,
184-202; New Literature (Xin wenyi), 181;
New Sensationalists, Shanghais, 191;
popular fiction (tongsu xiaoshuo), 190;
Qing, 135-142; sentimental, 47; SinoJapanese writing style (kanbun), 160162, 164, 168
Chiossone, Edoardo, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61,
74, 91, 92, 100, 101
Chch, see Woman with Balloon
Chsen , see Korean King
Chsh, see Morning Toilet
Chow, Rey, 6
Chya shinbun, 156
Christianity, Missionaries (China), 106,
n. 2; monogamous marriage, 386;
hidden Christians, 271
Chronicle of the Gods and Sovereigns, A, (Jinn
shtoki), 66
Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times
(Nihon shoki), 64-68, 91
Chai emperor, 66, 68, 85, 97
Cixi, Empress Dowager, 44, 112, 122,
123
Commendable Anecdotes on Creating a Nation
(Keikoku bidan), 154, 156
Communism, China: leaders, 372; Party,
46, 52, n. 67, 117, n. 37; revolution, 45
Comprehensive History of the National Literature,
98
concubinage, China, 135, Japan, 385
Confucianism: Book of Rites (Liji), 34,
105,106; canon, 32, 34, 38, 39, 51;
ritual teachings (lijia), 106-108, 114,
121, 132; condemnation of licentiousness, 149; education system, 35; filial
piety, 90; gender hierarchies, 159; rit-

431

ual doctrine on feminine virtue (yimei

zhi lijiao), 109-110; slogan: men delve
and women spin (nan geng nu zhi), 40,
41; social hierarchy, 7, 32, 37; social
mores and family practices (jiushi jiating
fengxi), 121
Contemporary Thirty-Two Types, A (Tsei sanjni s), 399, 400
Courier, The (Fumi-zukai), 162
courtesans: in China, 183; in Edo (tay),
294; yjo, 422, n. 61; in Paris, 384,
422
Creation of Man, 268
Cromwell, Oliver, 41
cross-dressing: demon in human guise
(renyao), 207, 235; female students, 118;
haori geisha, 416; see also dan and
onnagata on performative crossdressing
Crossroads of Good and Evil (Zenaku no chimata), 154, 160
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang
long), 197
DAnnunzio, Gabriele, 166, 174
Dadaism, 175
Daimaru Hiroshi, 354, 364, 370
Dai Nihonshi, see History of Great Japan
Exhibition of Contemporary French Art,
see Exhibitions
Daiyu buries the fallen petals (Daiyu sang hua),
227, 231
Daiyu sang hua, see Daiyu buries the fallen
petals
dkin, 418
dan (female impersonator), see Peking
opera
Dancing Girl (Maihime), 162
Danjur pattern, 289
Darwinism, social, 148
Datongshu, see One World Philosophy
Daudet, Alphonse, 174
Dazai Osamu, 175
Debate over the Rise or Decline of
Literature (bungaku kyokusui rons), see
Japanese literature
deitys body (goshintai), 74
della Francesca, Piero, 349, 352
Demon on the solitary isle (Kot no Oni), 396
DeSoto, Hernando, 87

432

index

Theory of deviant psychology, The, (Hentai

shinri), 392
Diet, Japanese parliament, 158
Ding Ling, 201, 202
Doll House, A, (drama), 243, 255, 256,
290
Domestic regulations (Nei ze) in Liji, 105,
106
Donghua shibao, see Tung Wah Times
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 166, 174
Doykai (Saturday Club), 127
Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng),
136-138
Drifting Clouds (Ukigumo), 153, 162
Drunken Beauty Guifei, The (Guifei zui jiu),
(Peking Opera), 225
Duanfang, Governor-General, 112
Dumas, Alexandre, pre, 419
Dworkin, Ronald, 20, 53

Eternal Woman (kuon no josei), 277, 279,

281, 305
Exhibitions in Japan: Exhibition of the
Association of Artists, Nikakai, 368,
n. 17; Exhibition of Contemporary French
Art (Dai-sankai furansu gendai bijutsu tenrankai), 320, n. 14; Hakubakai exhibition, 322, 326, n. 23; Kokuten exhibitions, 304; Annual Exhibition of the
Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, 349,
356; National Industrial Fair, 320; National Industrial Fair in Kyto, 313;
Salon of the Ministry of Culture,
(Bunten), 266, 333, n. 36; Takashimaya
exhibitionOsaka in Kimono (Kimono
no saka), 342, 343
Exhibitions in Europe: Paris World Exposition (Exposition universelle de Paris,
1900), 322, 323, 383

East China Sea, 122, 124

Eastern Style, (Azuma-buri), 403, 406
Eastern Times, The (Shibao), 115
Edo Murasaki Yoshiwara Genji, 403, 405,
412, 414
Edogawa Ranp, 396
Education, see Womens education
Egalitarianism: debate of (Pingdengshuo),
32, 32, n. 27, 33, 37, 41; egalitarian
ethics, 19, 20
Eguchi, 275
Eiga monogatari, see Tale of Flowering Fortunes, The
Eightfold Cherry Blossom, The (Yaezakura),
163
elegance (ga), 390, 391
Eliot, George, 152, 153, n. 18, 155
emperors: Chinese, 35; Japanese, 87, n.
55, 99, 273; Lady Butterfly, 322; loyalty
to (Japanese), 281; sacrifice of self to
(Japanese), 424
Enchi Fumiko, 173
Enlightenment, 21
Equality (pingdeng): 24, 32, 39; gender, 43
Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 274
Ericson, Joan, 172
erotic books (jshi), 149
erotics: national, identity of, 391, 392;
spiritual aspects of, 279
Essence of the Novel, The (Shsetsu shinzui),
147, 148, 176

Fan Juying, 198, 199

Fate in Tears and Laughter (Tixiao yinyuan),
195
female actors, see actresses
female impersonator, see dan and onnagata
Female nude with sun parasol (Higasa no rafu),
332
female students (n xuesheng): 105-132;
progressive (wenming zhi n xuesheng),
117; tutors of (mu), 105; virtue of,
106
Female Students (Jogakusei, journal), 159
Feminine virtues: sexually chaste (zhenjing),
compassionate (cishu), frugal (duanjian),
obedient (shunliang), 110
femininity, 260, 333
feminism: in China, 5; movement in Japan, 244
femme fatale: 13, 14, 265, 372; Japanese,
282; Western, 305
Feng Gengguang (Youwei), 217, 223,
229
Fenollosa, Ernest F., 148, 265, 273, 274,
281
filthy picture (kitanai-e), 301, 334
financial conglomerate (zaibatsu), 217
Fiske, John, 201
Fitzgerald, John, 201
Flat Bed, 380
Flaubert, Gustave, 174
Foam on the waves (Utakata no ki), 162

index
footbinding: anti-, 182; as national
shame, 385
Forbidden City, 44
Foreign Ministry, China, 217
Fragrant Buds on a Splendid Market, 198
Franklin, Benjamin, 87, n. 56
Freedom and Peoples Rights movement,
148
Freer, Charles, 273, 274
Freud, Sigmund, 294
Fujin, 343
Fujin Gah, 365, 366, n. 14
Fujioka Sakutar, 98, 99
Fujishima Takeji, 311, 312, 333, n. 35,
349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 356, 357,
358, 361
Fujita Tsuguharu, 334, n. 39
Fujo no kagami, see A Mirror of Womanhood
Fujo-kai, (Womans World), 367, 370
Fukagawa (district of Edo): geishas, 393,
397, 418, 422; gender ambiguity, 422;
haori geisha, 397; prostitutes, 387, 422,
n. 59; unlicensed prostitution district,
383, 397; women, 422; young women,
401
Fukuchi Nobuyo, 230
Fukuda Hideko, 89
Fukuoka Takachika, 97
Fukuzawa Yukichi, 2, 38, 39, 147, n. 5
fulian, see Womens Federation
Fumikos Feet (Fumiko no ashi ), 387
Fumi-zukai, see Courier, The
funeboko float, 74, 75
Fun shibao, see Womens Eastern Times,
The
Frybutsu, see Buddha of Art
Futabatei Shimei, 153, 162, 167
Futurism, 175
ga, see elegance
ga-zoku, elegant and vulgar styles, see
Japanese literature
Ganesco, Fernand, 318, 319
Geijutsuza, see Art Theater
Geisha and the Samurai, The, (drama), 243
geisha: 243, 245, 247, 252, 279; haori, 13,
398, 399, 403, 416; male, 303
genbun itchi, see Japanese language
Gender: ambiguity in Japanese painting,
265-306, 412, 422; consciousness of, 6,
7; conceptions, Victorian, 155; differ-

433

ence, 267; differentiation, 105; distinctions, 145; equality, 42; identity, 57;
nation, 1, 222; separation in womens
education, 110, 111, 124
German colony in Shandong, 218
geta sandals, 327
Gion: festival: 74, 75; pleasure quarter,
412
girl (shjo), 259
Gogol, Nikolai, 174
good wife, wise mother (rysai kenbo): 3,
10, 124, 171, n. 57, 241, 245, 265;
good wives and wise mothers (liangqi
xianmu), 121
Goodman, Bryna, 40, 49, 50
Goseda Yoshimatsu, 329
gosekku, see Boys Festival
Gracious and Refined Girls School
(Huixiu n xuetang), 115
Graves, Robert, 397
Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,
The, 348
Greenfeld, Liah, 50
Guanyin, see Bodhisattva)
Gudkun, see Hachiman gudkun
Guifei zui jiu, see Drunken Beauty Guifei,
The
Gyran Kannon, see Bodhisattva
habitu (ts), 422, 423
Habuta Eiji, 282, 392
Hachiman, 67, 72, 74, 77, 103
Hachiman Daibosatsu, 71
Hachimang shrines: Iwashimizu, 67;
Hakozaki, 81; Konda 68,70
Hachiman engi, (The Karmic Origins of
Hachiman), 68
Hachiman gudkun, 67, 68, 77
haiku, 255
Haishang chentian ying, see Shanghai Dust
Hakuba Society, 320; see also Exhibitions
Halls for revering chastity, (jingjie tang or
xuli tang), 110
Han, beauty, 355, high official, 109
Hana-goyomi, 403, 407, 418
Handel, George Frederick, 165
Hanlin Academy, 118
haori geisha, 397, 416
haori jacket, 286, 288, 399
Hariti (Kishimojin), 271
Hasegawa Shigure, 173

434

index

Hasegawa Tenkei, 166

Hashiguchi Goy, 290, 339
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 166, 174, 255
Haya-raig, see Rapid Descent of
Amida
Hayashi Fumiko, 173
He Xiangning, 128
Heaven and Earth (Tianshang renjian), 193,
195
Heavenly Maid Showering Flowers, The (Tian
n san hua), 227, 228, 231
Hebraism, 277
Hegel, G. W. Friedrich, 21, n. 5, 54, n. 74,
273; philosophy, 383
Heian: period, 72, 77, 99, 146, 385;
society, 145; womens writings, 172
Heidegger, Martin: 384; hermeneutic
methodology, employed by Kuki
Shz, 390
Heimat, (drama), 255, 257
Heine, Wilhelm, 329, 330
Hellenism, 277
Hentai Seiyoku Ron, see Theory of deviant
sexual desire
hi no moto, see land of the rising sun
Hibo Kannon (Merciful Kannon), 99, 100,
268-276, 269, 305
Higasa no rafu, see Female nude with sun
parasol
Higuchi Ichiy, 85, n. 53, 160, 163-165,
168, 169
Hiller, Kurt, 392
Hirabayashi Taiko, 173
Hiratsuka Raich, 173
Hishikawa Moronobu, 393, 399
History of Great Japan (Dai Nihonshi), 66
History of Japanese literature (Nihon bungakushi), 161
history textbook: Japan, 93, 94; primary
school children (Shinsen shgaku rekishi),
94, 96
Hobsbawm, Eric, 55
Hollywood films, 183
Honglou meng, see Dream of the Red Chamber
Honma Hisao, 249
Hori Tatsuo, 175
Hoshino Tenchi, 159, 165
Hoshi-tsuki yo-iri no shirabe, see Song of
Entering a Night of the Moon and Stars
Hosokawa Moritatsu, Marquis, 374, 377
Hu Hanmin, 30, 31

Hua Mulan, 90, 98

Huang Lihua, 194, 195
Huang, Xing, 127
Huayue hen, see Traces of the Flowery
Moon
Hugo, Victor, 155
Human Rights debate in China, 23
Husserl, Edmund, 383
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 174
Ibsen, Henrik, 166, 174, 243, 255, 290
Ichij Narumi, 322
Ichikawa Danjur, 286
Ichiysai Kuniyoshi, 84
ideal mother, 268
idealism, culture of, 367
Ideals of the East, The, 270
Iki no Kz, see Structure of Iki, The
iki, see bordello chic
iki-ningy, see living dolls
Imaizumi Atsuo, 331
immortality (amrita), 270
Imo to se kagami, see Mirror of Marriage
Imoseyama Onna Teikin, Kabuki play, 412
Imperial Actress School (Teikoku joy
yseijo), 243
Imperial Commission (to countries hosting
Chinese), 26
Imperial: Court (Chinese): 36; harem in
Heian-era, 424; household (Japan),
76, 102
Imperial Japan, 347, 348, 372, 381
Imperial Literature (Teikoku bungaku), 164,
165
Imperial Rescript on Education, 159
Imperial Theater, Tokyo (Teikoku Gekikj), 218, 219, 229, 243
Impressionism, 167, 174
In Front of a Silver Screen, 361, 363
In the Darkness (Zai heian zhong), 201
Inaka Genji Nise Murasaki, 388, 403,
India: 24, 277; as origin of Asian culture,
282
Inoue Masao, 250, 251
Inoue Mokuda, 336, 337
I-novel (watakushi shsetsu or shishsetsu), see
Japanese literature
International law (gongfa), 29
Iratsume (journal ), 156
Ishii Hakutei, 354
It Hirobumi, 273
It Shinsui, 304, n. 75

index
Iwakura Tomomi, 91, n. 65
Iwamoto Tei, 396, 397
Iwamoto Yoshiharu, 150-156, 158, 159,
164
Iwano Hmei, 166
Iwata Junichi, 396
Iwaya Shkai, 339, 340
Izayoi Diary, The, 152
Izumi Kyka, 168, 243, n. 8
Izzard, Sebastian, 399
Japan Romantic School, The (Nihon rmanha),
175
Japanese Art Academy (Nihon bijutsuin),
275
Japanese Imperialism: empire, 377, 379,
424; ethnicity, 383; exceptionalism
(nihonjin- ron), 383; government, 127;
law, constitution and election, 158;
Finance Ministry, 57; Minister in the
United States (chbei kshi), 383; Mint,
63; national anthem, 97; spirit (yamatodamashii), 13
Japanese language: origin of (yamato-kotoba), 150; genuine Japanese (honrai no
Nihongo), 145; national, (kokugo), 160;
standard spoken language (hyjungo),
162; Western languages incorporated
into Sino-Japanese styles (bunchokuyakutai), 162; unification of spoken and
written language (genbun itchi), 8, 144146, 148, 159, 162-164, 166, 168,
175, 176
Japanese literature: belles-lettres (bibungaku),
170; classical, 390; Debate over the
Rise or Decline of Literature (bungaku
kyokusui rons), 156; elegant writing
(bibungaku), 170; elegant and graceful (ybi), 98, 161, 176; Genbun-itchi,
162; gentle and elegant classical style
(gabuntai), 150, 159, 163, 168, 169;
Heian, 98, 99; high-low fused style
(gazoku setch-tai), 162; 150; history of,
98, 161; Japanese-Chinese-Western
mixed style (wa-kan-y konkbun), 162;
lively colloquial style, (zokubuntai), 150;
modern 143-177; pure literature (junbungaku), 9, 161, 170; pseudo-classical
(gikokun), 168; realism (kyokujitsuha),
157; standardized plain colloquial
style (kgobun), 162; genuine novels
(junsui no shsetsu), 153; Sino-Japanese

435

styles, (hentai-kanbun), 162; watakushi

shsetsu or shishsetsu, (I-novel ), 10,
171, 172, 173, 175; womens literature (jry bungaku), 172; writing style
(wabun), 161, 162, 176;
Japanese theater, see Kabuki
Japanese European style theater (shingeki,
shinpa): 243, 251, n. 22; straight theater
(seigeki), 254, troupes, 260
Japaneseness, 12, 13, 308, 315, 318, 331,
342, 344; Jings, 104,
Japanization, 310, 323, 329, 330
Jia Baoyu, 136, 139
Jiang Weiqiao, 121
Jin ping mei, see Plum Blossom in the Golden
Vase, The
Jing empress (Jing Kg): 8, 55-104;
as goddess, 73-77; imperial statue,
61-73; narrative of, 67; as martial
mother, 77-81; Okinaga Tarashihime
no Mikoto, 97; as Seibo Daibosatsu
(Sacred Mother Bodhisattva), 68; as
Supreme Commander,69, 93-96; as
virtuous wife, 83-85; as warrior, 8183, 85-93; as Western Amazon and
Guardian Deity of Modernity, 85-93
Jing kg engi emaki, 69, 70
Jimmu (Tenn), emperor, 63
Jinn shtoki, see Chronicle of the Gods
and Sovereigns
Jiuwei gui, see Ninetimes Cuckold
Joan of Arc, 89, 103
Jogaku zasshi, see Womens Journal, The
Jogakusei, see Female Students
John the Baptist (Jokanaan), 249-252
Jokei II, 279
Jones, Gretchen, 387
jry bungaku, , see Japanese literature
Josei, 362, 364, 365
jouissance: denial of, 419; of the Japanese
woman, 393; of women, 418;
Journal of the people (Minkan zasshi), 97
Juffer, Jane, 392
Kabuki theater: 10, 13, 14, 77, 384; actors,
389, 412; female actors (onna yakusha),
241, n. 1; female impersonator (onnagata), 13, 14, 219, 220, 242, 243, 249,
252, 253, 267, 283, 289, 290, 292,
297, 305, 412; young female impersonator (kagema) 412; Minami-za, in
Tokyo, 289; prostitution, connection

436

index

with, 286; plays, 246, 283, 286-290,

401, 412, 422
Kaburagi Kiyokata, 301, 304, n. 75
Kaempfer, Engelbert, 72, n. 34
kagema, see Kabuki theater
Kager Diary, The, 152, 172, 175
Kainosh Tadaoto, 237, 238, 267, 282305, 334, 284, 285, 292, 295, 299,
300, 302, 335
Kajin no kig, see Chance Meeting with
Beautiful Women
Kakiuchi Seiyo, 369, 371
Kamei Katsuichir, 175
Kang Youwei, 33-35, 39
Kangakai, see Society for the Appreciation of Painting
Kannon, see Bodhisattva
Kano Hgai, 99, 100, n. 82, 267-273,
269, 272, 275, 305
Kano Ayako, 219, 220
Kansei, period 81; Reforms, 73
Kant, Immanuel, 140, n. 8
Karcevskij, Sergej, 419
Karl, Rebecca, 42 , 140, n. 6
Kaseigaku, see Domestic Science
Katagami Tengen, 166
Katanoue Korenaba, 81, 83, n. 51
Kataoka Toshir, 336, 337
Kat Seiichi, 252
Katsukawa Shuntei, 81, 82
Katsurame maidens, 76
Katsushika Hokusai, 333, 399, n. 35
Katsushika Taito, 77, 78
Katsu-ura, see Victorious Inlet
Kawabata Ryshi, 333
Kawabata Yasunari, 175
Kawakami Mokuami, 283
Kawakami Otojir, 243-245, 246
Kawakami Sadayakko, 243-245, 248,
249, 250, 251, 254, 259, 261
Kawakami Sumiko, 245, 246
Kawakami troupe, 243-246, 254
Keikoku bidan, see Commendable Anecdotes on
Creating a Nation
Kenysha, see Society of Friends of the
Inkstone, The
Kharakan, Lev, 205
Ki no Tsurayuki, 417
kibyshi, vernacular forms of, 390
Kikuchi Ysai, 322, n. 17, 333
Kimono no saka, (Osaka in Kimono),
see Exhibitions

kimono: 91, 159, 245, 266, 289, 294, 318,

327, 369; sashes, 252, seams, 327
Kimura Akebono (Eiko), 157, 159, 160,
168
Kimura Shhachi, 326
kindergarten (Youzhi yuan), 111, n. 16;
education, 110, n. 13
King of Opera World (Jujie dawang),
215-218
King Wen, 109
Kirare Otomi, see Scarface Otomi
Kirare Yosa, 283
kisaeng, see Korean courtesans
Kisaragi Koharu, 260
Kishida Rio, 260
Kishida Rysei, 304, 358, 359, 361
Kishida Teruko, 358
Kishida Toshiko, 97, 159, n. 32
Kishimojin, see Hariti
Kitabatake Chikafusa; 66
Kitada Usurai, 168
Kitagawa Utamaro, 316, 317, 393, 398
Kitamura Tkoku, 156, 165, 169
kitanai-e, see filthy picture
Kitano Tsunetomi, 294, 304, n. 76, 342,
343
Kiyomi Rokur, 247
Klimt, Gustav, 304
Kobayashi Eitaku, 286, 288
Kobayashi Ichiz, 259
Kobayashi Kokei, 322, n. 18
Kobayashi Mango, 361, 362, 363
Kbun Academy, 125, 127
Koch, see Lady Butterfly
Kda Rohan, 156, n. 27, 164, 166
Koganei Kimiko, 157, 158, 159, 160
Koide Narashige, 331, n. 34
Kojiki, see Record of Ancient Matters
Kojima Kikuo, 374, 377
Kojima Takanori, 89, n. 58
Kokka, 268
Kokuga Society, see Association for the
Creation of National Paintingi
Kokuga ssaku kykai, see Association for
the Creation of National Painting
Kokumin no tomo, 156, 157, 165
Kokumin shinbun, 156
Kokuritsu Gink, see National Bank
Kokushi kiy, see Bulletin of National
History
Kokuten exhibitions, see Exhibitions
Korea: courtesans (kisaeng), 377; Japans

index
annexation of, 220, 244; Jings
invasion of, 56-104; kingdoms, 56, 77,
85, 89, 91, 94, 95; people, 83, 222;
prince, 245; Seikanron debate, 90;
Korean King (Chsen ), 244
Kosugi Tengai, 167
Kot no Oni, see Demon on the solitary
isle
Kotobukiya, 308, 337
Kuang Qizhao, 28, n. 19, 29, n. 21
Kuhn, Philip, 42
Kuki Ryichi, Baron, 383
Kuki Shz: 12, 13, 383-424; Buddhist
philosophy, 418; definition of iki, 393,
397, 419; homoerotic experience, 396,
397; sentimental fiction (ninj-bon),
417, 418; homonymns of iki, 418;
Umi yukaba, 423; see also bordello
chic (iki)
Kun opera (Kunqu), 230
Kunichika, see Toyohara Kunichika
Kunikida Doppo, 167
Kunisada, see Utagawa Kunisada
Kuniyoshi, see Utagawa Kuniyoshi
Kuroda Seiki: 308, 313-316, 318, 320,
323, 326, 327, 329, 333, 338; Morning
Toilet, 309; nudes, 327; oil paintings,
322, 325, 360; Wisdom Impression
Sentiment, 12, 325
Kurakawa Mayori, 57
Kusare tamago, see Rotten Eggs
Kuze Kannon, 281
kyka, parodic waka, 390
Kyoto City Specialized School for Painting
(Kyto shiritsu kaiga senmon gakk),
283
Kyto shiritsu kaiga senmon gakk, see
Kyoto City Specialized School for
Painting
Luomo di genio in rapporto alla psichiatria,
(Man of Genius), 174
Lady Butterfly (Koch), 320, 321
Lady Ise, 152
land of the rising sun (hi no moto), 83
Lane, Richard, 394, 403, 407
Larson, Wendy, 40, 125, n. 55, 190, n.
24, 198, n. 32
Lass Amao, The (Amao guniang), 201
Lauretis, Teresa de, 2
Law of Nations, 28, 44
Lee Haiyan, 48

437

Lee Ang, 197

Lee Leo Ou-fan, 181
Leninism, 46
Leonardo da Vinci, 293, 294, 296, 297,
298, 352
Leutner, Mechtilde, 53
Liang Qichao, 34, 35
liangqi xianmu, see good wives and wise
mothers
Liao Zhongkai, 128
Liaozi, 234, n. 23
Liberal Party: (Jiyt, Japan), 89
Liji, see Book of Rites
Lin Baochai, 136
Lin Daiyu, 136, 139, 141
Literary Art Society (Bungei kykai),
243
Literary Club (Bungei kurabu), 164
literati painting (bunjinga or nanga), 359,
360
literature, see Chinese literatureand
Japanese literature
Little Lord Fauntleroy, 157
Liu Xun, 111, 112, 113
living dolls (iki-ningy), 327, 328, 334
Lombroso, Cesare, 174
Lotus Sutra, 271
Love: ai, 279; qing 135-142, 190; in Chinese literature 386; free love (ziyou
lianai), 195, 198; homoeroticism and
samurai ethics, 281, 282; love-death,
135, 139; love game, 422; maternal,
268; Mencian idea of mutual love, 33;
Platonic, 279; professional, 423; public, 209; romantic, 48, 49; same-sex
love, 131, 132; spiritual, 257, 267, 279;
samurai way of love (shud nanshoku),
281, universal love (boai or jianai), 34;
unrequited, 424
Lu Lihua, 129, 130, 131
Lu Yin, 130, 190, n. 25
Luo xu piao xiang, see Wafting Scent of Fallen
Catkin
Machida Shinjir, 324
Madonna, 13, 265, 267, 270, 271, 275,
and the harlot, 305, n. 79
Maeda Kanji, 331, n. 34
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 174, 244, 254
magatama, (comma-shaped beads), 57, 91
Maihime, see Dancing Girl
maiko, 298, 304; apprentices, 294

438

index

Malangfu, (Jap. Merfu), 274

Mallarm, Stphane, 174
Man of Genius (Luomo di genio in rapporto alla
psichiatria), 174
Manysh, 423, n. 63
Manchu: aristocracy, 192; bannerman, 25;
Chinese, non-, 354; costume, 349, 354,
358, 359, 362; dynasty, 354; empire,
140; government, 31; governments
stipends, 192; high official, 109; lower
class families, 192
Manchukuo: establishment of, 381; puppet-state, 348
Manchuria: 217; Japans invasion of, 184;
Russian advance in, 126, 127
Mandala, Womb and Diamond, 418
Manners and Lives of Contemporary Students
(Tsei shosei katagi), 153, 154
Manteau (manto), 255-258
Manual of Style (Bunsh dokuhon), 145
Mao Dun, 190
Mao Zedong, 46, 54
Marquis Tseng, 25, 26, 29, 30
Marra, Michael, 384, 417
marriage, fee (China), 113, 114
martial bravery (bu), 98
Maruki Riy, 100, 101
Maruyama kyo, 270, 327, n. 27
Masamune Hakuch, 166, 167
Masaoka Shiki, 168
master-slave relationship, 35, 36
Matsui Sumako, 243, 244, 247-252, 248,
252, 254-259, 256, 257, 258, 261,
290
Matsushima Emiko, 337
Maupassant,de, Guy, 174
May Fourth: era 130; generation of, 231;
(New Culture) Movement, 31, 47, 51,
52, n. 67, 195, 218; New Culture era,
182
Mei Lanfang: 11, 205-239, 206, 225, 226,
228, 232, 233, Chinese female ideal,
205; Chinese Theater and Mei lanfang
(Shinageki to Bai Lanh), 222; as dan
actor, 209-213
Mei Shaowu, 206
Meiji Art Society (Meiji bijutsu kykai),
318
Meiji bijutsu kykai, see Meiji Art Society
Meiji emperor: 63, 64, 66, 98, 100, 104,
273; parent-child relationship of, 100;
visit to exhibition in Kyoto, 320

Meiji empress Shken, 98, 100, 101, 102

Meiroku zasshi, 147, n. 5
Meish empress, 386
Mencius, 33, 160
Mendelssohn, Felix, 165
Merciful Kannon, see Hibo Kannon
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry174
Mermaids Lament, The, 360-362
Meyer-Frster, Wilhelm, 244
Michelangelo, 268
Mikami Sanji, 99, 161, n. 37
Minbao, see Peoples journal
Ming dynasty, 136; fall of the, 137; late,
137, 141
Mingxing film company, 179
Mingxing yuekan, see Star Monthly, The
Minkan zasshi, see Journal of the people
Mirror of Marriage (Imo to se kagami), 153
Mirror of Womanhood, A (Fujo no kagami),
157
Mirviss, Joan, 82
misemono, see temple fairs
Mishima Yukio, 145, 146, 173, 305, n. 80
Mita bungaku, 172
mitate, (parodic juxtaposition), 247, n. 14,
390, 416
Mito School, historians, 66
Mitsukoshi department store: 290, 339,
368, n. 17; posters, 341
Miyake Kaho, 155, 159, n. 32, 163
Miyako no hana, 157
Miyako shinbun, 229
Miyamoto Sabur, 377, 378
Mizoguchi Kenji, 301, n. 72
Mizushima Niou, 359-360, 361-362, 365,
366, 368
Mizutani Yaeko, 243, n. 8, 250
Modern Girl: 10, 13, 14, 179-202, 349,
358, 367, 379; bourgeois, 189, 190,
200; capitalism, 187; Chinese translations of, 181, 182, n. 7; global phenomenon, 186; icon, Shanghai, 188;
modan gru (moga), 181, 182, 304, 305,
349, 367, 416
modern woman, 49
Modern Woman, A (Xiandai yi nxing), 180
moga, see Modern Girl
Moga in Chinese Dress as Seen Abaord a Train
in China, Fujo-kai, 370
Mohism, 34
Mona Lisa (La Gioconda), 275-276, 281,
293, 297

index
Mona Lisa, Portrait of, 289, 290, 293, 297,
304, n. 77
Mongol invasions of Japan, 67
Monna Vanna, 244, 254-259
mono no aware, (capacity to be moved deeply), 383
More, Hannah, 152
Mori gai, 157, 161, 162, 166
Mori Ritsuko, 243
Morimura Yasumasa, 298
Morning Toilet (Chsh), 308, 309, 313-316,
318, 320, 333
Moronobu, see Hishikawa Moronobu
Moroto Michio, 396
Mother of Captain Michitsuna, 152
mother-and-child motif, 271
Motoda Nagazane, 63
Motoori Norinaga, 383
Moulin Rouge, 260
Mozume Takami, 162,
mu, see female tutors
Mulan congjun, see Mulan, the Disguised
Warrior Maiden
Mulan, the Disguised Warrior Maiden
(Mulan congjun), 231, 232, Disney
movie, 90
Muqi, 275
Murai Brothers, 339
Murakami Kagaku, 267, 276-283, 305
Murasaki Shikibu, 85, n. 53, 97, 152,
169
Murata Uk, 223-228, 232
Murayama Kaita, 297
Myj magazine, 169, 311, 322, 384
Nagai Ai, 260
Nagai Kaf, 387, 389, 417, 422
Nakai Star, 276
Nakajima Shen, 154
Nakajima Toshiko (Shen), 159, 160
Nakamura Butsuan, 391
Nakamura-za theater, 283
Nakano Hajime, 396
nanga, see Chinese Southern School of
painting
Naomi (Chijin no ai), 305
National Art School, see Tokyo School
of Fine Arts
National Bank (Kokuritsu Gink, Japan),
85-88
national bonds (Japanese), 91
national flower (guohua), 211, 212

439

National Industrial Fair, see Exhibitions

National Painting (kokuga), see Association for the Creation of National
Painting
nationalism, China, 6, 11, 19-54, 140;
Japan, 38, 83, 332-334
Natori Shunsen, 290, 291
Natsume Sseki, 275
Naturalism: European literature, 167;
174; Japanese literature, 9, 167, 170,
172, 173, 174; Japanese Naturalists,
144, 148, 166-170, 174
Nei ze, see Domestic regulations
New Culture Movement, China, 48, 51,
52
New Life Movement, 185
New Literature, see Chinese literature
New Literature (Xin wenyi), 181
New Nations King (Shin koku ), 245, 246,
247, n. 15
New Woman (Xin nxing), 189, 231
New Woman: China, 14, 182, n. 6, 268,
366; Japan, 3, 255, 258, 366
New Youth (Xin qingnian), 195
Nezumiya Denkichi, 328
Ni hong guan, see Rainbow Pass
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 167, 174
Nihon bijutsuin, see Japanese Art Academy
Nihon bungaku zensho, see Complete works
of Japanese literature
Nihon bungakushi, see History of Japanese
literature
Nihon shoki, see Chronicles of Japan from
Ancient Times
Nihonga, see painting
Nihonga-yga divide, 266
Nihongi, see Chronicles of Japan from the
Earliest Times
Nihonjin- ron, see Japanese Imperialism
Ninetimes Cuckold (Jiuwei gui), 142
ninjbon, see sentimental fiction, Edoperiod
Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji, 387, 388; popularity of, 389
Nishida Masaaki, 326
Nishiyama Matsunosuke, 384, n. 4, 419,
n. 57, 422, n. 61; on iki, 392, 393,
n. 23
Nitobe Inaz, 386
Nitta Yoshisada, 89, n. 58

440

index

Nogi Maresuke, suicide, 423

Noh, 10; costumes, 83; theater, 76
Nojima Yasuz, 310, 331, n. 31
Nomura Yasushi, 313
Nonogase Banka, 276, n. 29
Nora, 255, 256, 290
Nordau, Max, 174
North China Herald, 181
n xuesheng, see female student
nude painting (rataiga): 298, 307-345; Nude
Woman (Rafu), 267, 277, 278, 279, 281,
282, 298, 300, 301, 324, 335
Nun Abutsu, 152
Nwa, 138
obi-belt, 91
Occident, the, 351, 354, n. 5, 360
Ochiai Naobumi, 161
Odagiri Mineko, 374, 377
Ogata Gekk, 97
Oguri Fyo, 167
Ohara peasant women (Ohara-me), 298
Ohara-me, see Ohara peasant women
jin emperor, 66, 71, 72, 77, 83, 85, 102;
prince, 80
Okada Sabursuke, 333, n. 35, 339, 360,
377, 379
Okada Yoshiko, 260
Okakura Kakuz (Tenshin): 265, 268, 270,
275, 383; on the status of Japanese
women, 385, 386
Okamoto Ippei, 277, n. 31
Okamoto Shins, 304, n. 76
Okinaga Tarashihime no Mikoto, see
Jing
kuma Shigenobu, 91
Okumura Masanobu, 398
kura Kihachir, 217, 218, 220, 224,
229
Oliphant, Margaret, 152
Omoide, see Remembrances
Omokage, see Vestiges
On Chinese Clothes, 367, 369
On the Novel (Shsetsuron), 153
One World Philosophy (Datongshu), 33-34
onnagata, (female impersonator), see Kabuki
Ono Chikky, 276, n. 29
Ono no Ots, 152
Onoe Baiko VI, 290, 291
opium dens, 372
Opium War, 140

Orient, the, 351, 354, n. 5, 360

Oriental femme fatale, 237
Oriental Manner, In the, (Ty-buri), 349, 350,
351, 354, 356, 357, 360
Orientalism, 349; European, 360; reverse,
1
orphanages (yuyingtang), 110, n. 14
Osaka in Kimono, (Kimono no saka), see
Exhibitions
Osanai Kaoru, 249, 250
sumi Tamez, 351
otokogi, see chivalrous spirit
Otomi, see Scarface Otomi (Kirare Otomi)
yama Sukeichi, 61
Ozaki Ky, 156, n. 27, 164, 166, 168
Ozaki Yukio, 156
Pacific War, 348
painting, Japanese: (Nihonga), 12, 13, 265306, 310, 322, 343; painters, 267,
275, 276, 333; painters, from Kyoto
and Osaka/Kansai, 304; decadent
painting, 267; historicism, 275; Kyoto,
282; modernism, 306; New Japanese
Painting (Shin-Nihonga), 265, 267
painting, Western-style: (yga), 265, 347381; nude, 304, 307-345, portraits,
350, 351, 353, 356, 357, 358, 359,
363, 371, 375, 376, 378, 379, 360,
377, 379, 349
Palace of Art, The (Yishu zhi gong), 196, 197
Paris World Exposition, see Exhibitions
in Europe 322, 323
Paris, 274, 314, 329
Pater, Walter, 281
patriotism, Chinese, 35
Patriotic Girls School (Aiguo nxuexiao),
107, 109
Paulownia, 61
Pavilion of the Royal Monument (Yu bei ting),
206
pearl divers, 298
Peking opera: 11, 14, 205-239; huashan
role, 213, 231, 234; sexy female role
(huadan), 213, 214; upright female
role (qingyi), 213, 239; male actor
performing female roles (dan), 205,
207, 208-219, 222, 227, 231, 234-237,
239; martial female role (dao ma dan),
213; senior male roles (laosheng), 207,
208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216; Best

index
Singer among Boy Actors (tongling diyi),
215-216; Best Singer among Female
Performers, (kunling diyi), 215
Peoples Armies (minjun), 44
Peoples journal (Minbao), 30, 31
Peoples Republic of China, 46, 47
Pillow Book, The, 152
Pincus, Leslie, 384, 385, 392, n. 19, 397,
n. 29, 416, 423, 424, n. 64
Pingdengshuo, see Egalitarianism
Pisanello, 349, 351
pleasure quarters (China), 105
Plum Blossom in the Golden Vase, The (Jin ping
mei), 149
Pomeranz, Kenneth, 45
Portraits, see painting, Western-style:
Position of Women, The (Fujin no chii), 154
Post-Impressionism, 276
Powell, William H., 87
primary care givers (baomu), 110, 110, n. 13
primary schools (Japanese), 93
Prince Shtoku, 66
Profile of a Woman holding an Orchid (Hkei),
349, 353
Progress (wenming): 106, 107, 112; 174;
ideology of, 176; propaganda, anti-,
121; ideas, 121; state-building agendas, 132; values, 118, 121; Progressive
Press (Wenming shuju), 113
Prostitutes: 76, 279; China, 115-117, 135142 , 372; Japan; 385, 418, 422, 424;
male, 301; Shanghai, 105, 141, 142
pure art (junshin naru geijutsu), 276, 282
pure literature (junbungaku), see Japanese
literature
Qi Rushan, 217, 222, 229, 236
Qin Pu, 198, 199
Qing dynasty: army, 139; belle, 360; court,
23, 27, 29; collapse of, 5, 192, 211;
documents, 113; dynasty, 42, 215, 348,
354, 355; decadence and disintegration
of, 137; late-, 47, 51, 105, 115, 122,
135-142, 208; educational authorities,
112; emperors, 207; government, 107,
139; officials, 106; costumes, 360
Qingdao, seized by Japan, 348
Qipao dress, 354, 355, 361-363, 377
Qiu Jin, 126-128
Queen Victoria, 62, 63, 91
Quong Tart, 27

441

Rainbow Pass (Ni hong guan), 226

Ranger, Terence, 55
Rapid Descent of Amida (Haya-raig),
270
rationalism, 49, 174, 176
realism, see Japanese literature
realistic novel (mosha shsetsu), 148
Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki), 67, 68
Records of Rites (Li ji), 105, 106
refined culture (bun), 98
Reforms, Tenp, 389
Remembrances (Omoide), 245, 248
Renaissance, 242, 276; Italian painting,
277, 349, 350, 355
Rengkai, 74, n. 41
Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 298
renyao (transvestite), 235
resignation (akirame), 419, 422, 423
Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui),
128
Ricketts, Charles, 250
ritual doctrine on feminine virtue, see
Confucianism
ritual teachings (lijiao), see Confucianism
Roden, Donald, 266, 267, n. 7, 392, 396
Rodin, Auguste, 320, n. 14
Rokumeikan period, 147
Romanticism, 166, 167; Japan, 165, Romantic literature, 146
Rongqing, 109-111, 113
Rosi, Giovanni Vittorio, 249
Rotten Eggs (Kusare tamago), 154
Roupu tuan, see Carnal Prayer Mat
Rubens, Peter Paul, 339
Russo-Japanese War, 3, 9, 11, 61, 94, 144,
166, 168, 170, 174, 177, 241, 244
rysai kenbo, see good wife, wise mother
Rytei Tanehiko, 387, 389, 403
Safuran, 282
Saganoya Omuro, 154
Sakai Naoki, 38
Sakaki Mitoko, 127, 128
Sakakibara Shih, 276, 297, n. 63
sakayaki, see shaving of the pate
Salom, 244, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253,
253, n. 24, 255
Salon de Beaux Arts, 313
Salon of the Ministry of Culture, (Bunten),
see Exhibitions
samurai: 386; government (bakufu), 386;

442

index

homoeroticism and samurai ethics,

282; knighthood, 281; way of love
(shud nanshoku), 281
Sand, George, 152
Sange modeng nxing, see Three Modern
Women
sanzon, see Buddhist trinities
Sappho, 165
Sarashina Diary, 175
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 383
Sato, Barbara, 7, 181
Saussure, de, Ferdinand, 419
Sawada Junjir, 282, 392
Sawamura Gennosuke IV, 289
Scarface Otomi (Kirare Otomi), 283, 286, 287,
289, 290; Onoe Baiko as, 291
School for revering chastity (Jingjie xuetang),
111, n. 16
schools for girls (China): 107-109, 112;
Scott, A. C., 233
Segawa Jok III, 283
Sei Shnagon, 152, 169
Seibo Daibosatsu, see Sacred Mother
Bodhisattva
Seikanron debate, see Korea
Seinan War (Seinan sens), 91
Seit, see Bluestockings
self-immolation (shinj), 423
sentimental fiction, Edo-period, (ninjbon),
151, 384, 389, 401, 417, 418, 422
seppuku, 389
Sexuality: 4; third sex, (chsei), 277, 281,
306; Dorian, 281; homo-eroticism,
131; 396; same-sex love, 131, 132;
sexual differences, 99; sexuality of
female students (China), 106; sexual
allure (bitai), 422; Theory of deviant
sexual desire (Hentai Seiyoku Ron), 392;
Victorian, 267, 149
Shakespeare, William, 155
Shan Zai, 131
Shanghai belle, 367
Shanghai Dust (Haishang chentian ying), 139,
141
Shanghai: 105, 117, 125, 130, 180, 193,
217, 365, 372, 373; entertainment
press, 183; Japans bombing of, 184
Shanghai, 372
shaving of the pate (sakayaki), 399
Shibao, see Eastern Times, The
Shikid Okagami, (Great Mirrot of Sexual
Behavior), 422

Shima Kakoku, 271, n. 15, 313

Shima Seien, 304, n. 76
Shimabara no onna, see Woman of Shimabara,
A
Shimamura Hgetsu, 166, 167, 243, 254,
255
Shimazaki Tson, 165, 166, 167
Shimizu Toyoko (Shikin), 153, 158, 160,
163
Shimoda Utako, 112, 122, 123, 124,
127
Shimomura Kanzan, 275
Shin koku , see New Nations King
shinafuku, see Chinese dress
Shinageki to Bai Lanh, see Chinese Theater
and Mei lanfang
Shinch, 166
Shin-Hanga, 304
Shin-Nihonga, see Painting,Japanese
Shinseinen, 363, 366
Shinsen shgaku rekishi, see history textbook
for primary school children
Shioya Jun, 271
Shiraishi Kayoko, 260
Shirakaba, 172, 173, 294
Shirokiya, Tokyo department store, 283
shishsetsu, see I-novel
Shis, 424
Shizuma Kojir, 246
shjo, see girl
Sh-Kannon, 279
Shksai Katsukyko, 82
Shkyokusai Tenkatsu, 253
Shsetsu shinzui, see Essence of the Novel,
The
Shsetsuron, see On the Novel
Shu Hokush, 367, 369
shunga, see Spring pictures
Shunj Gidan Mizu-age-ch, 403, 408, 409,
410, 411, 413, 418, 420, 421
Shunshoku Hatsune no Ume, 401, 402, 404
Shunshoku Ume-goyomi, 401-403, 412, 422
Shuntian shibao, 215-218
Singing Geisha Girl (Kagi), 301, 302
Sino-Japanese styles, see Japanese literature
Sino-Japanese War, 11, 94, 162, 164, 241,
242, 244
Sistine Chapel, 268
Sixi opera troupe, 215
Society for the Appreciation of Painting
(Kangakai), 273

index
Society for the Study of Public Law (gongfa
xuehui), 32
Society of Friends Magazine, 396
Society of Friends of the Inkstone, The
(Kenysha), 166
Sma Gyofu, 166
Song of Entering a Night of the Moon and Stars
(Hoshi-tsuki yo-iri no shirabe), 412, 415
Spencer, Herbert, 148
Spring pictures (shunga): 316, 383-424;
boom, 392; examples of, 394-395,
404-405, 406, 407, 408-409, 410411, 413-414, 415, 420-421
Stael, de, Anne Louise Germaine, 155
St. Anne, Mary, and Child, 294, 296
Star Monthly, The (Mingxing yuekan), 179
Stilke, Hermann Anton, 89
Stowe, Beecher, 152, 164
Stratz, C. H., 326, n. 25, 337
Structure of Iki, The, (Iki no Kz), 383385, 390, 391, 418, 423
Sturm und Drang, 167
Subaru, 172
Sudermann, Hermann, 166, 174
Sugimura Haruko, 260
Sukeroku, 422
Sumiyoshi deity, 68, 103
Sun Yat-sen, 31, 128, 205, 239
Sun Zhongshan, 126
Sun, The (Taiy), 164, 166
Suntory company, 308, 337, 338
surimono print series, 81
Surrealism, 175, 357
Suzuki Harunobu, 398
Suzuki Shinichi II, 100, 101
Suzuki Tomi, 98
Swinton, Elizabeth de Sabato, 397
sword, 69
Symbolism, 174; European, 167
Taine, Hyppolyte, 161
Taiping Rebellion, 25, 39, 139
Taiso Yoshitoshi, 266
Taiy, see Sun,The
Takahashi Kenji, 62
Takahashi Yuichi, 313
Takami Jun, 172
Takamura Ktar, 297
Takarazuka theatre, 259, male roles
(otokoyaku), 259, n. 31, 266
Takashimaya department store, 342,
poster, 343

443

Takatsu Kuwasabur, 99
Takayama Chogy, 168
Takeuchi Seih, 276, n. 29
Takeuchi no Sukune, Minister, 77, 80,
94, 103
Takizawa (Kyokutei) Bakin, 150, 160
Tale of Filial Lovers (Ern yingxiong zhuan),
138
Tale of Flowering Fortunes, The, (Eiga monogatari), 152
Tale of Genji, The, 152, 169
Tale of Ise, The, 152
Tale of Jruri, The, 152
Tale of Sagoromo, The, 152
Tamayorihime, 74, n. 40
Tamenaga Shunsui, 149, 401, 403, 412
Tamura Akiko, 260
Tamura Toshiko, 173
Tan Sitong, 34, 36, 39
Tanaka Heijir, 84
tanbi shugi, see Aestheticism
Tang Caichang, 31, 32, 34, 35
Tang Caizhi, 34
Tang dynasty, 274
Tangled Hair (Midaregami), 169
Tanizaki Junichir, 144, 145, 146, 175,
176, 304, 305, 360, 372, 387, 389,
417, 418
Tankikai, see Antiquarian League
tanzaku print, 83, 290
Tayama Katai, 166, 167
Taylor, Charles, 19, 21, 46
tay, see courtesan, Edo
Tazawa Inafune, 168
Teikoku Gekikj, see Imperial Theater
temple fairs (misemono), 327
Tengu Cigarettes (Tengu tabako), 339, 340,
341
tenj, see Buddhism
tennin, see Buddhism
Terauchi Masatake, Governor General of
Manchu, 220, 230
textbooks, history, (Japanese), 56, 96, 163,
n. 40
Karmic Origins of Hachiman, The (Hachiman
engi), 68
The Stone of Goddess Nwa (Nwa shi), 138
Theater Institute (Engeki kenkyjo), 243
Theater Reform Society, The (Engeki
Kairykai), 242
third sex (chsei), see Sexuality

444

index

Three Modern Women (Sange modeng nxing),

189
Tian n san hua, see Heavenly Maid
Showering Flowers, The
Tianshang renjian, see Heaven and Earth
Tkai Sanshi, 156
Tokun Rynosuke, 63, 91
Tokutomi Soh, 156
Tokyo Art Academy, see Tokyo School
of Fine Arts
Tokyo Law College, 30
Tokyo National University, 143,n.1
Tokyo Puck, 230
Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo geijutsu
gakk), 265, 290, 314, 315, 349, 360
Tolstoy, Leo, 166, 174
Tongmeng hui, see Revolutionary Alliance
Torii Kiyomitsu, 398
Torii Kiyonaga, 398, 399, n. 35
Torii Shinjir, 337
Tsei sanjni s, see Contemporary ThirtyTwo Types, A
Tsei shosei katagi, see Manners and Lives
of Contemporary Students
Ty-buri, see Oriental Manner, In the
Toyohara Kunichika, 286, 287
Traces of the Flowery Moon (Huayue hen),
139, 141
travel guidebooks, 74
Treaties: Unequal Treaties (bupingdeng
tiaoyue), 24, 27-31, 51; imposed on
Japan, 385, 386
Treaty of Ganghwa, 91
Treaty of St. Petersburg, 25
Treaty of Versailles, 52, 218, 235
Treaty Ports (China), 205
Truth of Fine Arts, The (Bijutsu shinsetsu),
148
ts, see habitu
Tsuboi Senjir, 97
Tsubouchi Shy, 147-151, 153, 154,
158, 161, 166, 176, 243
Tsuchida Bakusen, 276, n. 29, 298, 322,
n. 18, 333, 380
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 301, 389
Tuhua ribao, 115, 116, 119, 120
Tung Wah Times (Donghua shibao), 34
Tyler, Watt, 41
Uchida Kuichi, 64
Uchida Roan, 156, 171, n. 56

Uemura Shen, 301

Ukigumo, see Drifting Clouds
Ukita Ikkei, 79, 80
ukiyo-e: 266, 316; artists, 398; Shin-Hanga
movement of woodblock prints, 290;
see also Shunga
Umehara Ryzabur, 298, 331
Umi yukaba, 423
Uncle Toms Cabin, 164
Unequal Treaties, see Treaties
Uno Chiyo, 173
Usa shrine, 71, 72
Ushigome section of Tokyo, 128
Utagawa Kunisada: 387, 388, 389, 393,
398-401, 400, 403, 404, 406, 408409, 410-411, 412, 413, 415, 418,
420-421
Utagawa Kuniyoshi: 83, 84, 383, 392,
393, 394-395, 398, 403, 405, 407,
412, 414, 418, 419; school, 398
Utakata no ki, see Foam on the waves
Vattel, de, Emmerich, 24, n. 8, 44
Venus: 267, 279; Indian, 305; beauty of,
341, Venus at a Mirror, 339
Vernacular [Journal] (Baihua), 127
Vestiges (Omokage), 157, 162
Victorious Inlet (Katsu-ura), 76-77
Virgin Birth, 270
von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 174
votive tablets (ema), 56, 76, 93, 103
wabun, see Japanese literature
Wafting Scent of Fallen Catkin (Luo xu piao
xiang), 198
Wagner, Wilhelm Richard, 174
Wakamatsu Shizuko, 157, 158, 160, 168
Wang Dulu, 197, 198, 199, 200
Wang Jingwei, 31
Wang Lian, 125, 126
Wang Ronghe, 27
Wang Dulu, 197, 198
Warbler in the Grove (Yabu no uguisu), 155,
163
Waseda bungaku, 165, 166
Watanabe Eriko, 260
Watanabe Seitei, 320, 321, 322
Watanabe Shzabur, 290, 304, n. 75
Watsuji Tetsuro, 73, n. 38, 396, 397, n. 29
Way of the warrior (bushid): 98, 99;
concept of, 386; warrior-code, 417

index
Wealthy nation and strong army (fukoku
kyhei), 93
Weininger, Otto, 174
wenming, see progress
Western Paradise, 270
Westernization, 368, 370
Wilde, Oscar, 174, 244, 248
Winkel, Margarita, 404, 414
Wisdom Impression Sentiment (Chi Kan J),
322, 323, 325, 326, 329, 333, 338,
342
Wo hu cang long, see Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon
Woman from Yen-chou, 274
Woman in a Danjur Robe, A, 286, 288
Woman of Shimabara, A (Shimabara no onna),
294, 295
Woman with Balloon (Chch), 298, 299
Womans World (Fujo-kai), 367
Women in Three Fashion Modes, 377, 378
Womens Bureau of the Chinese
Nationalist Party, 46
Womens Eastern Times, The (Fun shibao),
131
Womens education: 105-132, Education
Board, 113-115, 120, 124; education
in the family (jiating jiaoyu), 110; Practical Womens School, Tokyo (Jissen
jogakk), 123-124, 127, 128
Womens Federation (fulian), 47
Womens Journal, The (Jogaku zasshi), 98, 147,
148, 150, 151, 154, 156-159, 165,
Womens Rights Movement, Japan, 97-98
Working Womens Congress of the Communist Jiangxi Soviet, 46
world-spirit (Weltgeist), see Asian world
spirit
Wu Daozhi, 274, 275
Xiangbao, see Hunan journal
Xin nxing, see New Woman
Xin qingnian, see New Youth
Xin wenyi, see New Literature
Xu Xiacun, 181
Xue Fucheng, 29
Yab-yum, see Boshisattva
Yabu no uguisu, see Warbler in the Grove
Yaezakura, see Eightfold Cherry Blossom,
The
yakshini, 279

445

Yamada Bimy, 156, n. 27, 320, 321,

322
Yamamoto Yasue, 260
Yamanaka, art dealer, 274
Yanagawa Shigenobu, 401, 402
Yang Xiaolou, 212, 216
Yano Rykei, 154, 156
Yasuda Yojr, 175
Yasui Star, 374, 375,
Ye Haowu, 107, 109, 121
Yi Shunding, 208-212
Yishu zhi gong, see Palace of Art, The
yga, see painting, Western style
Yokogushi, 267, 283-290, 284, 285, 292,
294, 304, 305
Yokohama photographs, 308
Yokomitsu Riichi, 175, 372, 373
Yomiuri newspaper (Yomiuri shinbun), 61,
66, n. 23, 157, 159
Yorozu Tetsugor, 331, 332
Yosano Akiko, 169, 342
Yoshiwara: prostitutes, 297; bad area,
397; pleasure quarter, 390; Nakamura
Butsuans history of early, 391
Yu bei ting, see Pavilion of the Royal
Monument
Yu Qiong, 27
yuagari bijin, see Beautiful women
yjo, see courtesan
yuna, see bath-house girls
Yuzhou feng, ([The precious sword named]
Yuzhou feng), 231, 233
Zai heian zhong, see In the Darkness
zaibatsu, see financial conglomerate
Zenaku no chimata, see Crossroads of Good
and Evil
Zeng Guofan, 25, 29
Zeng Jize, 25, 29
Zhang Boxi, 109-111
Zhang Henshui, 192-197, 199, 200, 217
Zhang Jianhua, 29
Zhang Zhidong, 109-113
Zhongguo liu Ri n xuesheng hui, see
Association of Chinese Women
Students in Japan
Zhou Xiufeng, 193, 194, 195
Zhuang Yu, 121
Zola, mile, 166, 167, 174
Zongli Yamen, 26, 28

446

index

SINICA LEIDENSIA
41. McLaren, A.E. Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables. 1998.
ISBN 90 04 10998 6
42. Svarverud, R. Methods of the Way. Early Chinese Ethical Thought. 1998.
ISBN 90 04 11010 0
43. Haar, B.J. ter. Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads. Creating an Identity. 1998.
ISBN 90 04 11063 1
44. Zurndorfer, H.T. Chinese Women in the Imperial Past. New Perspectives. 1999.
ISBN 90 04 11065 8
45. Pohl, K.H. Chinese Thought in a Global Context. A Dialogue Between Chinese and
Western Philosophical Approaches. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11426 2
46. De Meyer, J.A.M. and P.M. Engelfriet (eds.). Linked Faiths. Essays on Chinese Religions and Traditional Culture in Honour of Kristofer Schipper. 2000.
ISBN 90 04 11540 4
47. Ven, H. van de. Warfare in Chinese History. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11774 1
48. Wright, D. Translating Science. The Transmission of Western Chemistry into Late
Imperial China,1840-1900. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11776 8
49. Schottenhammer A.(ed.). The Emporium of the World. Maritime Quanzhou, 10001400. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11773 3
50. Jami, C.P. Engelfriet & G. Blue (eds.). Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming
China. The Cross-cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562-1633). 2001.
ISBN 90 04 12058 0
51. Tapp, N. The Hmong of China. Context, Agency and the Imaginary. 2001.
ISBN 90 04 12127 7
52. Lackner M.I. Amelung & J. Kurtz (eds.). New Terms for New Ideas.Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China. 2001.
ISBN 90 04 12046 7
53. Jing, A. The Water God s Temple of the Guangsheng Monastery. Cosmic Function of
Art, Ritual,and Theater. 2001. ISBN 90 04 11925 6
54. Zhou Mi s Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before Ones Eyes. An Annotated
Translation by A. Weitz. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12605 8
55. B.S. McDougall & A. Hansson (eds.). Chinese Concepts of Privacy. 2002.
ISBN 90 04 12766 6
56. K.-H. Pohl & A.W. Mller (eds.). Chinese Ethics in a Global Context. Moral Bases of
Contemporary Societies. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12812 3
57. Gulik, R.H. Sexual Life in Ancient China. A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and
Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12601 5
58. Sato, M. The Confucian Quest for Order. The Origin and Formation of the Political
Thought of XunZiy. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12965 0
59. Bluss, L. & Chen Menghong (eds.). The Archives of the Kong Koan of Batavia. 2003.
ISBN 90 04 13157 4
60. Santangelo, P. Sentimental Education in Chinese History. An Interdisciplinary Textual
Research on Ming and Qing Sources. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12360 1
61. Mather, R.B. The Age of Eternal Brilliance. Three Lyric Poets of the Yung-ming
Era (483-493). 2003. ISBN 90 04 12059 9 (set)
62. Van Gulik, R.H. Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period. With an Essay on Chinese
Sex Life from the Han to the Ching Dynasty, B.C. 206-A.D. 1644. 2004.
ISBN 90 04 13664 9 (volume one). ISBN 90 04 13665 7 (volume two).
ISBN 90 04 13160 4 (set)
63. Eifring, H. Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature. 2004.
ISBN 90 04 13710 8
64. Viltinghoff, N. Mapping Meanings. The Field of New Learning in Late Qing
China. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13919 2

65. Moore, O.J. Rituals of Recruitment in Tang China. Reading an Annual Programme in
the Collected Statements by Wang Dingbao (870940). 2004. ISBN 90 04 13937 0
66. Csikszentmihalyi, M. Material Virtue. Ethics and the Body in Early China. 2004.
ISBN 90 04 14196 0
67. Chiang, S-C.L. Collecting the Self. Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of
Late Imperial China. 2004. ISBN 90 04 14203 7
68. Jorgensen, J. Inventing Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch. Hagiography and Biography in
Early Chan. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14508 7
69. Lowry, K.A. The Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th-Century China. Reading,
Imitation, and Desire. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14586 9
70. Took, J. A Native Chieftaincy in Southwest China. Franchising a Tai Chieftaincy under
the Tusi System of Late Imperial China. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14797 7
71. Ter Haar, B.J. Telling Stories. Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History.
2006. ISBN 90 04 14844 2
72. De Meyer, J.A.M. Wu Yuns Way. Life and Works of an Eighth-Century Daoist
Master. 2006. ISBN 90 04 12136 6
73. Ruizendaal, R.E. Marionette Theatre in Quanzhou. 2006. ISBN 978 90 04 15104 8
74. Sargent, S.H. The Poetry of He Zhu (1052-1125). Genres, Contexts, and Creativity.
2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15711 8
75. Chen, J. Philosopher, Practitioner, Politician: The Many Lives of Fazang (643-712). 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 15613 5
76. Komjathy, L. Cultivating Perfection. Mysticism and Self-transformation in Early
Quanzhen Daoism. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16038 5
77. Pan, A. Painting Faith. Li Gonglin and Northern Song Buddhist Culture. 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 16061 3
78. Svarverud, R. International Law as World Order in Late Imperial China. Translation,
Reception and Discourse, 1847-1911. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16019 4
79. Bray, F., V. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann and G. Mtaili (eds.). Graphics and Text in the
Production of Technical Knowledge in China. The Warp and the Weft. 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 16063 7
80. Ou, C. Life in a Kam Village in Southwest China, 1930-1949. 2007. Translated by D.
Norman Geary. ISBN 978 90 04 16229 7.
81. Greenbaum, J. Chen Jiru (1558-1639). The Development and Subsequent Uses of
Literary Personae. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16358 4
82. Kaske, E. The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 18951919. 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 16367 6
83. Eisenberg, A. Kingship in Early Medieval China. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16381 2
84. Thrasher, A.R. Sizhu Instrumental Music of South China. Ethos, Theory and Practice.
2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16500 7
85. Au, C. Modernist Aesthetics in Taiwanese Poetry since the 1950s. 2008.
ISBN 978 90 04 16707 0
86. Crevel, M. van. Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money. 2008.
ISBN 978 90 04 16382 9
P dzka, I. Gao Xingjians Idea of Theatre. From the Word to the Image. 2008.
87. ~abe
ISBN 978 90 04 16828 2
88. Halbertsma, T.H.F. Early Christian Remains of Inner Mongolia. Discovery, Reconstruction and Appropriation. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16708 7
89. Bryant, D. The Great Recreation. Ho Ching-ming (1483-1521) and His World. 2008.
ISBN 978 90 04 16817 6
90. Gamsa, M. The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature. Three Studies. 2008.
ISBN 978 90 04 16844 2
91. Croissant, D., C.V. Yeh and J.S. Mostow (eds.). Performing Nation. Gender Politics
in Literature, Theater, and the Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880-1940.
2008. ISBN 978 90 04 17019 3