SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

The Department Store, the Mannequin Girl, and the Politics of the Gaze in 1930s Japan

Abstract

If the dynamic logic of capital undermines any stable structure of perception, as Jonathan Crary has written, then the interwar years in Japan represent a moment of radical perceptual transformation. After the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, the organic historical city was gradually replaced by a rationally planned metropolis dominated by the ocular register. The tactility of traditional Asakusa entertainments gave way to the overwhelmingly visual dynamic of Ginza with its advertising banners, billboards and show windows. The department store, like the cinema, became a privileged site for the consumption of images. Modernity has always been associated with vision; with the objectifying male eye of science and Western painting. In the new urban culture, however, this mastering look was gradually  eroded by a commodified visual experience in which both gaze and subjectivity were distracted and fluid.

My talk will explore modernism's response to the culture of consumer spectacle in stories by Tanizaki, Yokomitsu and Itō Sei. I contend that visuality provides the fundamental narrative and perceptual form of these works; that the crisis of narrative is directly related to the crisis of male vision. The gaze is no longer only about mastery, but also about reciprocity and uncertainty; gendered oppositions can be undermined or partially reversed. The department store sales girl and her even more glamorous incarnation, the mannequin girl, emerge as favourite objects of male fantasy and projection, but also as figures of the greatest ambivalence. At this particular historical moment, the spectacular urban culture dominated by the logic of the commodity also held certain utopian possibilities.

Speaker Biography

Irena Hayter completed her PhD at SOAS in 2009 and is now Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds. She has published on the historical unconscious of Japanese modernism (in Perversion and Modern Japan, edited by J. Keith Vincent and Nina Cornyetz) and on photography as a technology of narrative estrangement in the early Dazai Osamu (in POETICA 78).