Japan's Wartime Modernity: Sewing and Dress in the Era of Emergency
Andrew Gordon - Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History Harvard University
The Council is pleased to present the Eleventh Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. In one widely held perspective, “wartime modernity” is an oxymoron. In one widely held perspective, “wartime modernity” is an oxymoron. Japan’s road of the 1930s into World War II veered sharply from the liberalizing trends of the 1920s, an era both cosmopolitan and internationalist, and thus modern, into a “dark valley” of militarism and anti-Western, anti-modern thought and behavior. This change included a “break in the Japanese evolution toward Western dress” through the militaristic top down imposition of uniform dress on the population at large. Similarly, the war is said to have interrupted both the spread of household sewing machines and of Western dress as it imposed the traditional agricultural work outfit known as monpe. Although such a perspective is not without some merit, I will argue against the full or easy acceptance of it, in line with recent scholarship which has argued that “the maturation of modern institutions and not their stunting led to the burst of expansionism of the 1930s,” and that “a Japanese modern mass-culture” indeed “continued into the Pacific War because the consumer-subjects of the patriarchal Japanese family-state did not want to let go of the modern.” This new approach has centered primarily on the public face of culture and economic life. I use the history of the household sewing machine and its uses to move the inquiry into the homes and the wardrobes of both working and middle-class families, in particular seeking to recover a sense of the agency of women as both subjects and consumers.