Organizer: Laura Miller, Loyola University of Chicago
Chair: Nobue Suzuki, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Discussant: Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University
The goal of this interdisciplinary session is to explore the images and depictions of women which have been given vitality and import through media attention. Panel presenters will track the ways that newspapers, magazines, journals, and other print media have selectively engaged with emerging ideas about women’s social roles and identities. Although our papers draw from different disciplines, all of them are characterized by some unifying assumptions. We do not take media images of women as straightforward mirrors of reality, but rather understand them as deliberately created constructions which reflect particular theories of the female. All the presentations will attempt to link media images to historically-situated social concerns and anxieties. We wonder whether these images buttress or challenge prevailing social norms, and what impact, if any, they have had on how individuals experience and structure their lives. Some social critics believe that media images can easily be dismissed as innocuous visual or literary propaganda, or as the straightforward products of consumer marketing decisions. But we see in them a legacy of typifications, whether these are uncritically accepted or not, which insidiously take root in women’s consciousness. And no matter how playful or grave they are, the media images we examine have been critical to the serious business of defining female gender in Japan. The first and last presentations will ask audience members themselves to participate in a critique of images of women found in visual media.
Changing Portraits of American Women in Postwar Japanese Women’s Magazines
Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Idealized portraits of white, western women, especially Hollywood movie stars, figured seductively in the popular culture of Japan in the 1920s. After 1945, the white woman was back—bigger, better, and blonder than ever before, and promoting the virtues of democracy. Japanese women’s magazines such as Fujin koron and Fujin gaho of 1946 and 1947 glorify this American Woman as assertive, thrifty, hardworking, intelligent, and a model of good works for her community. She never fails to engage in vibrant conversation and she is always cheerful. "Unlike in Japan," as these magazines are fond of saying, in the U.S. women have the full support and respect of their male partners. Given the extraordinary dimensions of this portrait, it is little wonder that in the 1950s when these magazines become more critical of U.S. policies, they chip away at the American Woman, pointing to the class and racial inequities this image masks, and finding fault with the ideology of modern womanhood she embodies. After concisely outlining this history and the attendant changes in Japanese women’s images in the same magazines, this presentation engages the audience in a brief discussion of what is at stake in exploring this topic by focusing on a few provocative cartoons and fashion photos found in the 1940s and 50s magazines.
Who Defines the Image? Women Writers, Tonderu Onna and Yellow Cabs
Akiko Hirota, California State University, Northridge
In Japan’s rapidly changing society, new terms and phenomena emerge in quick succession. The media, in pursuit of hot topics, capitalize on them in a sensational manner, sometimes cheering them on and other times bashing them. Such phenomena from the late 1970s through the 1990s include the Tonderu Onna Boom, the Croissant Syndrome, the Hanako-zoku, and the Yellow Cabs. Women writers and journalists also play a critical role, not only by constructing images of women in their writings, but also by serving as role models. The male dominated media with their own agendas and biases may easily influence or mislead their female readership, as Matsubara Junko claims in her book The Croissant Syndrome. But consumers of mass media themselves participate in perpetuating images and in characterizing new spheres for women. It is not only the publishers, but also the eager fans who victimize popular writers by forcing them into churning out mediocre work at a fast pace. And it may be the media coverage of women’s changing behavior (demanding new courtship patterns, delaying marriage, having fewer children, initiating divorces, wielding their purchasing power) that is helping to force the government and the corporations to accommodate women’s concerns. This paper examines the interrelationships among new trends, media hype, women writers, and readers against the backdrop of actual social changes which have taken place during the past two decades.
Nationalizing and Engendering the Problem: Asahi’s Coverage of Sexual Harassment
Hiroko Hirakawa, Guilford College
Stimulated by the filing of the first sexual harassment lawsuit by a woman in Fukuoka in August, 1989, Asahi Shimbun began to take up the issue of sexual harassment. Paying close attention to lexical, syntactic, and representational devices that Asahi used in its coverage of sexual harassment, this paper will identify the patterns in which Asahi organizes characters and events, and how such patterns as a whole produce what Joel Best called an "orientation statement," i.e., the evaluation and assessment of what sort of problem is the purported problem of sexual harassment. In so doing, I provide a critical reading of how Asahi simultaneously (re)produces and refracts the dominant and gendered cultural identity. I also locate the complex duality of Asahi’s orientation statement in both institutional and ideological contexts of Japanese newspaper publishing firms.
Media Typifications of Hip bijin in the 1990s
Laura Miller, Loyola University of Chicago
Young Japanese women of the 1990s are coming of age in a society permeated with visual images which promote selected forms of female beauty. Rather than treating the images found in magazines and in beauty industry promotional materials as simple depictions of archetypal fashions, or as mere advertising ploys, this paper will ask what values or meanings they are projecting. While the immature models cherished in earlier years perfectly embodied the cultural ideals of naivete and docility, today’s menu of beauty types often exhibits a rejection of these qualities. Visual representations of women who have had obvious encounters with hair dyes, depilatory creams, eyelid adhesives, and the newest version of the Miracle Bra, encode layered ideas about gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. The new surface expression of self-confidence and adult sexuality reflected in media images of faux-Hawaiians, cheeky urbanites, and sophisticated hedonists is a radical departure from the ineffectual cuteness and immature innocence of the past, reflecting changes in women’s social roles and aspirations. But these new images also send a message which is contradictory to some enduring cultural proscriptions. The earnest narcissism required to obtain these new body styles runs counter to a long-standing gender norm which dictates that, more than any other trait, women should never be self-centered or selfish. The presentation will conclude with an invitation to members of the audience to share their own interpretations of some selected visual images.