Japan’s Jazz Age: Flappers and Feminists ~ by Lesley Downer

‘In the beginning, woman was the sun.’

Hiratsuka Raichō

Moga, pictured in 
Mainichi shimbun 

‘Modern gals’

If you had visited Tokyo in the 1910s and 1920s, you would have met Japanese women stepping out confidently with short flapper skirts and scandalously short hair, a million miles from the stereotypical ‘submissive Japanese woman.’ They were moga - ‘modern gals’ - a term coined by the great Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in his novel A Fool’s Love. Not all women were moga, but there were enough to flavour the era.

While Europe was engulfed in World War I, Japan, which was allied to Britain, was enjoying an economic boom. In the Meiji period, Japan’s Victorian era, the country had burst spectacularly into the modern age and onto the world stage. And by now westernisation, prosperity and mass culture had spread to nearly everyone in Japan. Now everyone was enjoying the benefits.

1929 ad for Shirokiya department store

Speed, sport and sex
After the hard work and discipline of the Victorian era, when the government was determined to build up the nation to protect it against colonisation, the new era (named Taishō, after a new emperor came to the throne) was like a fresh breeze blowing through.

The Meiji constitution had been all about keeping women in their place, slotting them into the template of ‘good wives, wise mothers’. But by the 1910s and 1920s the rebuilding was done. Suddenly people were free to let their hair down and be themselves. 

At last the younger generation had a voice. They didn’t have to follow in the drab footsteps of their elders. Those of us who remember the Sixties - Flower Power, Women’s Lib - will recognise the thrill, the exhilaration. 

Moga 1928 in 'beach pyjama' style

Youth power
This was Japan’s Jazz Age - the age of speed, sport and sex, of anything goes. There was universal education. With one of the world’s largest student populations, Tokyo was enjoying a boom in the publishing of books, journals and newspapers. People were free to think and talk and argue and throw around words and ideas like socialism, Marxism, anarchism, democracy and freedom. They also had money which they could spend any way they liked.

Forget ‘good wife, wise mother’. These women had jobs. They could be typists, elevator girls, shop clerks, nurses, writers, journalists or beauticians, and be financially independent. Some moga worked as waitresses in cafes, dispensing sexual favours where they saw fit, like Naomi in Tanizaki’s ground-breaking A Fool’s Love, a sort of Japanese Lolita, the story of a man hopelessly besotted with one of these cool aloof creatures.

Tipsy by Kobayakawa Kiyoshi

The moga were the trendsetters along with mobo - ‘modern boys’. Moga cut their hair short, like boys, and flaunted short flapper skirts, while dapper mobo wore their hair long and swept back in the all-back style and sported bell bottoms, bowler hats and horn-rimmed Harold Lloyd glasses.

They hung out in cafes and bars, they smoked, talked and argued, they practised free love and they strolled along the Ginza, Tokyo’s most fashionable street. They listened to jazz, danced the Charleston, watched American movies and ate ice cream. Until the authorities clamped down, Marxism was all the rage and everyone read the latest revolutionary Russian novels, such as Aleksandra Kollontai’s A Great Love.

Militant feminists
Out of this fizzing free love milieu sprang pioneering feminists.

Hiratsuka Raichō (1886 - 1971),
 from her autobiography

Hiratsuka Raichō lived the life. She famously said that marriage was ‘slavery during the daytime and prostitution at night.’ In 1908 at the age of 22 she eloped with an older married man, Morita Sohei, and the two tried - and failed - to commit suicide together in time-honoured Japanese fashion. She then had two children by a much younger lover whom she only married when her children were adults, taking her husband’s surname so that her son would not be negatively impacted when he was drafted.

She was also more than prepared to speak up for women’s rights. In 1911 she founded Seitō - Bluestocking - Japan’s first all-women literary magazine. The first words were ‘In the beginning woman was the sun’ - a reminder that in Japanese mythology the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, is the creator of all life.

The first issue of Seitō, 

September 1911,

cover illustration by 

Naganuma Chieko

Seitō was packed with stories and articles expressing women’s sexuality with no holds barred. One story detailed the break up of an arranged marriage, another was a graphic description of casual sex with a man the author picked up in a bar. The upholders of traditional values, particularly in the government, were outraged and both issues were banned.

Then Hiratsuka started publishing articles daring to attack the capitalist system and the established order and demanding women’s rights. For the powers that be this was the last straw. In 1916 the Home Ministry forbade distributors to supply the magazine. Sales instantaneously dried up and the magazine had to close down.

But that didn’t stop Hiratsuka. At the time women were banned from attending political meetings on the basis that they should be at home looking after their families. In 1922 Hiratsuka and her fellow activists managed to get this law overturned though female suffrage was still a long way off. Women were not included when universal male suffrage was introduced in 1925. She and her fellow activists were condemned as ‘New Women’, a term which they enthusiastically embraced.

Yosano Akiko (1878 - 1942)

Seitō’s most famous contributor was the poet Yosano Akiko. She too had an affair with a married man whom she later married; the couple had eleven children. Her first volume of poems, Midaregami - Tangled Hair - was a passionate expression of her love for him. Critics attacked the book as immoral and obscene but it was loved and widely read and became a beacon for supporters of women’s rights. At the height of the Russo-Japanese War she published a poem entitled ‘Thou shalt not die’, exhorting her younger brother who was a soldier not to sacrifice himself for this senseless war. It became the anthem of the anti-war movement and was picked up again after World War II.

Midaregami (Tangled Hair)
by Yosano Akiko

These were women who took their lives in their own hands. Their power was their independence. Perhaps some of them even thought that the times they were a-changing, that a new age was dawning, as we did in the Sixties as we looked forward to the coming of the Age of Aquarius. But those that did discovered all too soon - as we did - that they were wrong. The era of speed, sport and sex turned out to be just a flash of brightness before the darkness of World War II closed in.

For more on Japan’s pioneering feminists, you could read

In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist by Hiratsuka Raichō, translated with an introduction and notes by Teruko Craig (Columbia University Press 2006)
and
A Girl with Tangled Hair: the 399 poems in the Midaregami by Akiko Yosano, translated by Jane Reichhold and Machiko Kobayashi

All images are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and in particular all things Japanese. For more about these amazing women and much else, please see my new book, The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications). My travel book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, was also reissued last year, by Eland. For more see www.lesleydowner.com
    

'Strange how potent cheap music is...' Listening to the sounds of the past - by Christina Koning

When you’re trying to recreate the past, there’s nothing quite so evocative as listening to the popular music of an era, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few months of researching and writing my soon-to-be-published novel, Game of Chance. The book is set in 1929, on the eve of the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent Great Depression, and much of the action takes place in a snow-bound London, where poverty and unemployment are already much in evidence. I wanted to portray this - but also to show the deep class divisions in the society of the time. And so my story, a murder mystery, moves between several very different worlds - from the shabby backstreets of New Cross and Shoreditch, to the more affluent squares and closes of Knightsbridge and Mayfair; from the bohemian circles of Camden Town and Notting Hill, to the country houses of the Home Counties. One thing all these otherwise disparate worlds had in common was the music of the times - available to any home that possessed a wireless, and also to be heard across the capital in nightclubs and at fashionable parties.

In researching this, and putting together a playlist of some of the most popular tunes of 1929 (see attached link), I was struck by how many of the songs still to be heard today were first written and performed in that golden era we call the Jazz Age. Melodies such as Gershwin’s incomparable ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, Bix Beiderbecke’s ‘Singin’ the Blues’, or Duke Ellington’s ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’, date from that year, as does the wistful ballad, ‘I’ll See You Again’ (performed by the Master himself), from Coward’s operetta, Bitter Sweet. Perhaps more surprising, is that many of the songs later recorded - and made their own - by renowned artists such as Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald, were first performed, often in rather less sophisticated versions, in the late 1920s. 

‘Singin’ in the Rain’ - later made famous by Gene Kelly in the 1955 movie of that name - is one of these, its up-tempo 1929 version sung by one Cliff Edwards. ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ (later a Sinatra classic) was recorded no less that four times in 1929 - by Harry Richardson, Eddie Walters, Eddie Cantor, and Paul Whiteman. There were also several recordings of ‘My Blue Heaven’ - another song which has been covered many times by artists in the years since. ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’ - later memorably performed by Marilyn Monroe in the 1959 spoof of the Roaring Twenties, ‘Some Like It Hot’, was first recorded by Helen Kane thirty years earlier. Other perennially popular favourites, such as ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird’, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ and ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’ also first hit the airwaves in that remarkable year.    

In writing Game of Chance, I had a great deal of fun incorporating snatches of some of these wonderful songs into the chapters describing a glamorous party, held at the Cadogan Square home of a beautiful ‘Society’ hostess. Amongst the popular ‘hits’ being played by the jazz band hired for the night, is the show tune ‘Oh, Lady Be Good!’ from the musical of that name, whose lyrics beautifully encapsulated the dreamy sensuality of the mood I was trying to convey:

Oh, sweet and lovely lady, be good

Oh, lady, be good, to me;

I am so awf’lly misunderstood,

So, lady be good to me…

Other tunes now familiar from later ‘covers’, but then brand-new, included ‘Ain’t She Sweet?’, ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ and ‘Let’s Misbehave’ - another song whose lyrics stay just the right side of suggestiveness:

We’re all alone

No chaperone

Can get our number

The world’s in slumber

Let’s misbehave…

The prevailing mood of many of these songs is a sort of manic cheerfulness - a refusal to be ‘downhearted’ in the face of trouble and hardship. One particularly touching lyric - ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby’ (with music by Jimmy McHugh and words by Dorothy Fields) was apparently inspired by the writer and lyricist spotting a young couple looking in the window of Tiffany’s jeweller’s shop in New York; the title line was supposedly said by the young man to his girl. Whether this is an apocryphal story or not, the song (later recorded by Billie Holiday) does capture something of the spirit of the times, with its mixture of bravado and wry resignation:

Gee, I’d like to see you lookin’ swell, baby,

Diamond bracelets Woolworths doesn’t sell, baby;

Until that lucky day, you know darn well, baby,

I can’t give you anything but love…

Nor is this the only song from 1929 whose determination to ‘look on the bright side’ acknowledges that there is a darker side to life. The perennially popular, and (to my mind, at least) rather too jaunty ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, presupposes that the ‘happy days’ in question haven’t always been ‘here’. The almost insufferably bouncy ‘When the Red, Red, Robin, Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ contains the lines

There’ll be no more sobbin’

When he starts singin’

His old, sweet song…

No wonder these tunes proved so popular throughout the Depression and during the Second World War. They were the musical equivalent of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters put out by the Ministry of Information in 1939 to ensure that people didn’t succumb to gloom and despondency during the Blitz. They celebrated love, life and happiness in the face of looming disaster. And, dammit - they were catchy!

For these and other musical treats of 1929:

https://open.spotify.com/user/eamonnvi/playlist/5Fc21Iay611BUa6tXZfrU3