Between Vernacular Modernism and Fascist Spectacle: On the Japanese Mannequin Girl

On July 31, 1937, the Japanese national newspaper Asahi carried a photograph of a group of stylishly dressed women facing the camera, smiling, caught in movement. What appear to be patriotic slogans are pinned like sashes across their bodies; some of the women carry donation boxes (Fig. 1). The image is accompanied by a short news item about fashion models performing “patriotic service” (hōshi). “Beguiling” in their elegant Western outfits or Japanese kimono, around forty of these “mannequin girls” had gathered at the Nijūbashi bridge gate of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo the previous day and had “worshipped the emperor from afar”, bowing in his direction. Afterwards, the models headed for the bustling urban entertainment districts of Ginza, Marunouchi, and Shinjuku, where they collected contributions for the army until late that evening. The image and the text are nestled among articles on various civic initiatives in support of the front (jūgo) and help for soldiers’ families, appeals to frugality, and advice about everyday economies. The event is described as the “general mobilization” of fashion models. [1] 

The item appeared weeks after the so-called China Incident from July 7, 1937, when a clash near Beijing marked the beginning of a full-scale war with China.[2] The term “general mobilization” (sōdōin) became ubiquitous in the media. It seems strangely out of place, however, when applied to  fashion models—as incongruous as the nationalist slogans pinned to their elegant outfits. As urban working women strongly associated with Hollywood film and fashion, the mannequin girls were icons of Japan’s vernacular modernism. They produced new female subjectivities often at odds with the state-sponsored ideal of the “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo). How could be they be “mobilized” to enact emperor worship and collect contributions for the army?

 This article explores the cultural politics of the mannequin girl through media representations, writings, and sartorial performances. Articulate high-profile models such as Takashima Kyōko (dates unknown), Komai Reiko (1908–42), and Maruyama Miyoko (1897–unknown) questioned consumer spectacle’s regimes of visual objectification. They resisted or boldly threw back the male gaze, opening up zones of indeterminacy and detachment. I argue that their performances rescued Western female dress from popular associations with loose morals, aligning it with ideas of dynamism and functionalist modernity. In the second part of the article I demonstrate that the mannequin girls embodied the ideological vulnerability of Japan’s vernacular modernism. Traversing cultural regimes and employing diverse sources (still and moving image, journalism, memoir), my analyses show how consumer seduction and nationalist indoctrination shared the same urban and media spaces, deployed the same rhetorical devices, and appealed to the same publics. I juxtapose the image of the models’ “patriotic service” with Horino Masao’s emblematic photograph “Gas Mask Parade” (1936) and argue that mobilization worked in different affective and ideological registers: not only as precision-synchronized order and bodily discipline, but also as loosely coordinated unity where spontaneity and control were ambiguously entangled. 

The article aims to address the almost complete absence of the mannequin girl from Anglophone scholarship—despite her prominence in Japanese media cultures at the time and despite studies of her Euro-American contemporaries.[3] My work also expands research on Japanese department stores’ collaboration with the state, for both politics and profit, and their investment of consumer spectacle with ideological content.[4] It contributes to the recent investigations of new body politics and changing social norms in the late 1930s–40s, as expressed in visual culture.[5] I aim to add to the ongoing re-examination of the historiography of the Japanese 1930s as a homogenous landscape of austerity and sacrifice (often contrasted to the cosmopolitan 1920s and their vibrant mass cultures of desire). The article builds on studies of the images and practices of mass culture during the 1930s and wartime, and the contradictory aesthetic-sensory mix they offered: duty and pleasure, austerity and beauty, sacrifice and spectacle. My work contributes to scholarly efforts to map this complex affective terrain in order to disarticulate its seductive pull.[6]

Modanizumu and Its Heroines

Miriam Hansen’s expansive concept of vernacular modernism is analytically productive for me because it embraces genre promiscuity and translatability: it includes “the mass-produced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban environment . . . photography, radio, and cinema.”[7] It also allows for transnational flows and processes of acculturation, for globally co-eval but distinctive local responses. As Kyoko Omori has observed, Hansen’s concept resonates with what Japanese intellectuals and cultural critics in the 1920s–30s called modanizumu. Spanning the popular, the lurid and the highbrow, modanizumu was vernacular modernism as a structure of sensibility and a sensory paradigm that captured the urban experience.[8] As a mode of cultural production it did not belong to a single medium or genre but was found across journalism, literature, jazz, cinema, and radio. The phonetic rendering in Japanese of the English term points reflexively to processes of translation and transculturation. If kindai, the word for “modern,” was strongly associated with Japan’s state-driven modernization and industrialization, scholars have argued that modanizumu connoted frivolousness, brightness, and newness in everyday life, as well as consumerism and hedonism.[9] Importantly, it also stood for women’s advancement in society and for an upheaval of social mores often attributed to the pervasive influence of Hollywood. Historian Barbara Sato asserts that modanizumu constituted “a new stage in the self-conceptualization of young Japanese women.”[10]

The mannequin girl was a vital player in this vernacular modernism because she combined the lived historical reality of the urban working woman and the fantasy of the modern girl. Observed and studied in journalistic accounts, government surveys, and bureaucratic reports, the professional or urban working woman (shokugyō fujin) disturbed socio-spatial divides between public and private and disrupted their gendered coding.[11] As a new social phenomenon she created “profound anxieties about the future of family life and national unity”, according to Margit Nagy.[12] Because of her performance of new identities and subjectivities, media representations of the working woman were either sexualizing or moralistic. The modern girl (modan gāru), on the other hand, was more of a fantasy construct found across advertising, film, popular literature, and cultural commentary.[13] Like her Euro-American contemporaries—the Neue Frau, the garçonne, the flapper—the modern girl represented the shifting social underpinnings of gender with her smoking, drinking, and unfeminine speech. An urban working woman, the fashion model, according to an important novel from 1935, was at the same time imagined as “the most avant-garde modern girl.”[14] A Lexicon of Fashionable Modern Terms (Modan ryūkōgo jiten, 1930) compiled by the highbrow women’s journal Fujin kōron (Ladies’ Review) included an entry for “mannequin girl” (alongside names of Hollywood actors and other key terms for understanding the present such as “wink” and “Hegelian dialectics”).[15]

The first department store to hire women to model clothes was the Marubishi in Tokyo in November 1928. Excited newspaper coverage attracted big crowds. There is a first-person account of the experience by one of the seven mannequin girls selected. The author signed with her first name only, Kiyoko, but is most probably Hasegawa Kiyoko, who later would be professionally known as Komai Reiko.[16] Kiyoko describes how her hair was bobbed and curled and confesses to feeling shocked by her own transformation into “a vamp from the movies” (she spells it in full, vanpaia). Remarkably, she was instructed to pose still and pretend she was a doll, but also to change poses now and then.[17] Soon after that, engaging models became the hottest marketing strategy of Tokyo department stores. Following Marubishi’s example, flesh-and-blood women were frequently placed among mannequin dolls, often in lit-up show windows, with advertisers exploiting the effect of lifeless forms coming to life. The models played on the boundaries of movement and stasis, life and artifice. There were even prizes for those who most successfully transformed themselves into dolls.[18] 

Behind the ingenious idea to have live women pose in show windows and displays there were starkly profit-driven motifs. Around 1929 they were cheaper than both the handmade Japanese dolls traditionally used as display dummies and the modern mannequins imported from France (Inoue, Ningyō no yūwaku, 138). An article in the women’s magazine Fujin saron (Ladies’ Salon) highlighted the cruelty of this market logic by sarcastically bemoaning “the falling market price of humans.”[19] Placed in close proximity to the commodity both literally and figuratively, the fashion models were easily identified with it: the Yomiuri newspaper, for example, directly compared their freshness and exoticism to those of “newly imported foreign goods.”[20] It was this proximity that drew criticism from the left and from feminists. A poem in the proletarian literary journal Bungei sensen (Literary Front) from September 1929 presented the mannequin girl as exploited and at the same time decadent: not only “a proponent of petit-bourgeois hedonism,” but also a “practitioner” of it who liked showing off her legs and sought desirous looks.[21] The poem belongs to a strand of Marxist critique that saw modern girl-type figures as the corruption of working-class femininity. There is, however, a certain ambivalence as the poem lingers on libidinally charged female body parts: it describes the breasts of the mannequin girl, accentuated by the obi sash of her kimono, her thighs, knees, and calves. The class-based denunciation is colored by anxieties about female visibility in the public sphere that were common across the political spectrum at the time. 

The poet Fukao Sumako (1888–1974) saw tragic irony in the fact that the models were nothing but surrogates for display dummies; to her they looked as if their souls had been extracted. To be compared to a doll, Fukao declared, was “an insult” to the women “breathing the air of now.” They were a vulgar sideshow, repulsive and somewhat machine-like.[22]  The most sophisticated and penetrating critique came from an anarcho-feminist, Yagi Akiko (1895–1983). For Yagi, the mannequin girl was a staggering example of how deeply the logic of the commodity had penetrated society: a real human being was displayed as an item for sale. Yagi argued that the models were subjected to forms of alienation that were distinctly modern. Estranged from their bodies, they showed clothes with price tags on. Yagi was clear that the new economies of display depended on a particular politics of sexualized spectacle. Under the footlights in the show window the mannequin girls endured the lustful looks and comments of the men passing by. A living human being had to become as rigid as a doll—this process for Yagi was the dehumanizing opposite of the puppet theatre, where “the emotionless, lifeless doll can attain, through movement . . . beauty and soul.”[23] Yagi did concede, however, that some mannequin girls possibly enjoyed posing and displaying their beauty. She detected elements of self-confidence and self-importance in the mannequins’ performance. 

The leftist and feminist critiques and the dynamics of sexualization and commodification they identified are complicated by the fact that at least some of the models could speak for themselves. Only elite department stores in Tokyo and the Kansai area (Kobe, Osaka, and Kyoto) and big-name manufacturers of cosmetics and kimonos hired mannequin girls. In Tokyo, the business was dominated by four big agencies.[24] Among them the Tokyo Mannequin Club, founded by Komai Reiko and Takashima Kyōko and from 1932 managed by Maruyama Miyoko, stood out. Its most sought-after models enjoyed star status, their schedules full for a year ahead. Fashion and beauty arbiters, they were frequently profiled in national newspapers and commissioned to write for women’s magazines. Fujinkurabu (Ladies’ Club), for example, had Komai Reiko join film stars Kurishima Sumiko (1902–87), Okada Yoshiko (1902–92), and Umemura Yōko (1903–44) in discussions of make-up and cosmetics.[25] These top mannequin girls emerge as subjects capable of self-representation. It is their significant discursive presence that makes it possible to assemble signs of intentionality and to attempt to recover agency; to grasp the mannequin girls’ role as performers of modernity and producers of cultural meaning.[26] In an interview for Fujin kōron some mannequin girls stressed the importance of showing women customers how kimonos and Western outfits looked on actual bodies in a variety of poses, in stillness and in movement, and of demonstrating how the feel of clothes changed from moment to moment.[27] In a similar vein, Takashima Kyōko stated: “Previously, clothes were seen only in terms of fabric or pattern. Our job is to express their dynamic beauty and bring out a three-dimensional, sculptural feel.”[28] The mannequin girls appear very clear about the nature of their jobs. They show an awareness of embodiment and movement, and seem conscious that modeling adds a kinesthetic dimension to clothes. Importantly, their statements explicitly address women. 

At least in the beginning, however, the department stores’ use of models was more about novelty and sensationalism, rather than being a conscious strategy to encourage identification on the part of women consumers. Images and journalistic accounts show mostly men looking at them; the male gaze dominates both visual and discursive representations.  Even in women’s magazines male writers ensure its centrality. There are openly controlling and voyeuristic investments at play: the caption of a candid shot of models during their break, for example, asks: “They are the prey of people’s looks the whole day, why are they so cross when caught by the eye of the camera?”[29] The models themselves seem aware of these dynamics of sexualization. One admitted to initially being quite shaken by the hostility and frank libidinality of some male gazes, but gradually getting used to them. She trained herself to look back, in a calm and composed manner, and listen to the comments of the onlookers without blushing. For others, the very performativity of modeling provided a defense mechanism (“Manekin ni kiku”, 170, 161). Some mannequin girls exploited the visual reciprocity of urban spectacle and not only returned, but overpowered the gaze, creating zones of unpredictability and equivocation. A magazine piece titled “Men as Seen by a Mannequin” (Manekin no mita dansei), by Takashima Kyōko, neatly reverses power dynamics: “Some men come in groups, and they laugh and jeer, others stare for ages at our faces. If you glare at them severely, though, they get anxious, almost as if you have exposed their secret or seen through their weaknesses, and scuttle away.”[30] Here the male gaze is thrown back in a confusion of active and passive registers; Takashima breaks the voyeuristic illusion. 

The setup of the doll could be appropriated by the models and the confusion between life and artifice turned into a strategic performance. In another essay, Takashima describes such a performance as amusing and pleasurable. She recounts an experience of posing still among display dummies and actively erasing her humanity in order to blend in with them. The men looking on were arguing excitedly among themselves about whether she was a human or a doll. For Takashima, the situation became so comical that she struggled to keep a straight, mask-like face. She had to run to the dressing room before exploding into paroxysms of laughter, her departure provoking surprised gasps and exclamations from the crowd.[31] Takashima is conscious of the different strategies of disarticulating the male gaze: boldly throwing it back or playing with the tensions between animate and inanimate. A mask of lifelessness could, paradoxically, be a sign of a lively subjectivity—especially when used by models like her, who are clear-eyed about the asymmetries of visual and social power. By twisting the trope of the doll to their own purposes, the models could expose culturally constructed ideas of femininity. 

Like Takashima, Komai Reiko insisted that the models appealed to women, not men. Through their discursive and visual presence, both Takashima and Komai emphatically rejected regimes of the look and forms of visual address that were about sexualization and voyeurism. They also resisted cultural readings of the mannequin girl that placed her within the genealogies of eroticized sociality: “We shouldn’t be regarded in the same vein as geisha or café waitresses . . . . We don’t act coquettishly . . . . Reputation is everything in our business,” wrote Komai.[32] She made it clear that she would refuse magazine requests for advice on how women should flirt and attract men. Through her writings and sartorial performances Komai promoted clothes as signifiers of modernity. The Asahi from July 8, 1931 features a full-length shot of her alongside a picture of the Hollywood actress Anita Page (1910–2008) (Fig. 2). 

They are wearing similar outfits: knee-length plissé skirts, shirts, high-heeled pumps, and hats. The skirts complement the forms of the body and liberate its movements: they are belted to accentuate the waist, but they also allow big strides. The plissé design is fluid, changing shape and moving together with the body. Form follows function, a key modernist dictum. The masculine shirts are softened by the flowing fabric they are made of. In a radical departure from the heavy ornamentalism of historical Western female costume, the new aesthetic pioneered by Coco Chanel (1883–1971) in the 1920s consisted of feminine versions of male dress such as suits and shirts. With its connotations of formality, the shirt can be said to symbolize women’s entry into the public realm. The text accompanying the images reassures readers that chic clothes can also be affordable (Komai’s ensemble, shoes, and accessories, provided by the Matsuya department store, totaled forty-nine yen—about 57,000 yen or 380 US dollars in today’s equivalent) and asks them openly which outfit they prefer—an example of the use of models to address women. 

The other two images come from Shiseido Graph, the PR magazine of the cosmetics company, and are again clearly aimed at women. They show a model in two very different outfits: a somber kimono and an elegant Western dress (Fig. 3). 

The article tells us they were designed and sewn by Komai Reiko herself using the same material, dark olive taffeta fabric with a delicate check pattern. The dress has a white shawl collar and a big ribbon around the waist; the kimono also uses a light-colored obi sash to create contrast. Made from affordable material, the dress, like the kimono, relies on a few elegant details. These designs display again a marked inclination towards seriousness, functionalism, and egalitarianism. The silhouette is streamlined and slender in all four images, but the Western outfits demonstrate a new relationship to the body and its movement. In the schematic tropes that ruled Japanese popular novels and their film adaptations in the 1920s, Western clothing stood for vanity and aggressive sexuality. The four images and the texts accompanying them give us a glimpse of the important role played by the mannequin girls in rescuing Western dress from these associations and aligning it with ideas of functionalism and mobility. 

Elite mannequin girls were articulate and educated. All twenty or so members of the Tokyo Mannequin Club had graduated from girls’ college (jogakkō), the highest level of public education available to women (Komai, “Manekin no uchiake banashi,” 73). Most were in their twenties, some were married. Some came from the shingeki Western-style theater, others worked as film extras. The club was also well-connected to the literary world: Komai was married to Asanuma Yoshimi (1906–65), a Tokyo University law graduate who wrote fiction and moved in literary circles. Asanuma was the founding editor of the coterie literary journal Aozora (Blue Sky) which also included among its staff Iijima Tadashi (1902–96) and Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–90), both poets and prominent film critics. Maruyama Miyoko was married to Maruyama Kaoru (1899–1974), a poet close to literary modernists such as Inagaki Taruho (1900–77) and Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942). 

Komai, according to a writer for the women’s magazine Fujin saron (Ladies’ Salon), negotiated high rates for her club’s members but also ran it as a non-exploitative “co-operative of equals.”[33] Urban ethnographer and cultural critic Kon Wajirō (1888–1973) confirms that well-known mannequin girls were paid around eight yen a day and that many earned above 200 yen a month, almost three times the average pay of male graduates. Kon considers modeling to have been the highest-paid female occupation at the time. Other sources, such as the magazine Fujin sekai (Ladies’ World), also give 200 yen as possible top earnings. At the time, according to Maruyama Miyoko’s memoir, shop assistants only made eighty sen a day, while “dancehall girls” could make around eighty yen a month with tips.[34] In interviews and articles, the motivations of the mannequin girls are almost invariably presented through scripts of filial piety and wifely sacrifice: they are doing it to help their families or husbands. The challenge their financial independence and visibility presented to a gendered social space had to be effectively recuperated within a patriarchal economy. The subtitle of Maruyama Miyoko’s memoir, A History of Showa by a Poet’s Wife, announces the persona Miyoko fashions throughout the text—the devoted wife of a struggling poet (Maruyama Kaoru found success and a permanent academic position only after the war). The vivid tone of her writing, however, with its nostalgic evocations of Ginza’s neon-flooded nightscapes and the pleasures of modern life, conveys a sense of freedom beyond wifely duty.

Modelling Ideology

The models were Hollywood-inflected incarnations of urban modernity but their “emperor worship”—the news item with which I began the article—should not come as a surprise. Scholars have illuminated the thick connections between consumer culture and propaganda in 1930s–40s Japan in terms of aesthetics, the historical actors engaged, and the strategies of persuasion deployed.[35] I would argue that on their part the mannequin girls embodied the spatial and sensory continuities between consumer spectacle and the mobilization movement. Their strong association with Ginza in a way reflected its double character: since the Meiji period, imperial pageantry, military victory parades, and consumer desire had coexisted there. The idea of slogans fastened across the body, used in the mannequin girls’ “patriotic service” event, came from advertising: the models often demonstrated clothes with big price tags attached or carried promotional signs hung around their necks—such as in the campaign for Shiseido’s New Mix toothpaste in 1929 (Fig. 4).

Purely formally, the models’ patriotic walk on Ginza in 1937 resembles another Shiseido advertising coup, the relaunch of its Beauty Soap in 1932. Maruyama Miyoko describes it with an explicitly military term: “mannequin parade” (Maruyama, Manekin gāru, 79). A fragment from a film recording has been preserved. Twelve models clad in very similar floaty dresses and carrying identical umbrellas emblazoned with the Shiseido brand are seen walking the Ginza. Visually quite dynamic, the film fragment captures their progress through editing and frequent changes in camera position (Fig. 5: 1930s Film Clip of Parasol Girls Walking in the Ginza, YouTube Video, 3:44).

Repeated shots in which the women advance towards the camera resonate strongly with the image that would catch models performing “patriotic service” some years later (Fig. 1). In both the film and photograph, the women move in a formation that seems free-flowing and yet coordinated. In both, the camera is far enough for faces to be visible, but the models still appear somewhat deindividuated. Rather than meticulously synchronized uniformity, however, what we have is an overall impression of unity, enhanced by the strong graphic presence of repeated brand images and patriotic slogans, respectively. Like the film, the photograph is governed by a cinematic optic of bodies caught in motion. The image conveys energetic movement, and the accompanying text reinforces the meanings of fitness and endurance: the women spent the whole day walking and collecting donations across urban districts quite far apart (Ginza, Marunouchi, Shinjuku), covering considerable distances. The mannequin girls are modeling not only devotion to the emperor but also physical strength. Women’s modernity and dynamism are being offered to the state, giving us a glimpse of the militarization of the female body that would unfold fully during wartime.[36] Aesthetic appeal, however, still remains important. The models represent a femininity that is active and healthy, but also stylish: well-arranged hair, made-up faces, colorful clothes; no wonder the Asahi described them as “beguiling.” Looking confidently at the camera and smiling warmly, they establish an emotional connection with the viewer. The image and the text reveal how mobilization involved different ideological and psychic registers and could work by sensory seduction.

 The location of the image is also weighted with imperial symbolism—it can stand metonymically for the very body of the emperor. From the mid-1920s, state events centered on the emperor were staged in the spaces in front of that same Nijūbashi bridge, spilling into the external gardens of the palace. The ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors held in April 1931, for example, drew crowds as large as 34,000 people.[37] In these events, shared space and the synchronicity of time created a sense of direct participation in the rituals of the state and bound together the imperial community. The appeal of ritual was enhanced and amplified by the modern media technologies of radio and film. Whether directly perceived or mediated, the visibility of the imperial body fed the longings for presence and immediacy that characterized the mood of the 1930s. 

These energies culminated in the coup d’etat attempt on February 26, 1936. The aim of the army radicals from the so-called kōdō (imperial way) faction was to overthrow the government and bring about direct imperial rule. One of its leaders, Nishida Mitsugi (1901–37), wrote that “an unjust, immoral . . . crowd has divided the people and their most sacred, most beautiful and most beloved emperor.”[38] The insurgency was suppressed, but it cast a long shadow. The army used it to tighten its grip on the state. By July 1937, after months of martial law and the escalation of provocations on the continent into a full-scale war, it was clear that no political mechanisms could control the military. Nishida Mitsugi himself was sentenced to death and executed on August 19, 1937, a couple of weeks after the image of the smiling, stylish mannequin girls performing emperor worship appeared. Appropriating the aesthetics (and actors) of consumer culture, the image offers dynamism and beauty to conceal any possible fears and anxieties about the creeping militarization of public life. Its workings are akin to those of fascist spectacle in Italy and Nazi Germany, where sensory-affective surface appeal was used to gloss over ideological and political contradictions.[39] 

The image of the models forms a striking counterpoint to the iconic representation of collective mobilization that is “Gas Mask Parade”, Horino Masao’s photograph of the civil air defense parade of schoolgirls that took place on Ginza a year earlier, on June 27 and 28, 1936 (Fig. 6). 

In Gennifer Weisenfeld’s penetrating reading, “Gas Mark Parade” works as fascist spectacle because it offers a visual rhetoric of complete control in compensation for the political destabilization of the time (Weisenfeld, Gas Mask Nation, 154–95). The stylistics of the two images could not be more different: the models’ “patriotic service” is performed in a free-flowing, dynamic formation conveying the spontaneous embrace of ideology and caught in snapshot-style photo reportage. By contrast, Horino’s photograph is indeed all about control: rigidly coordinated spatial order, meticulously choreographed bodies in synchronized movement, full effacement of individuality by masks and uniforms. Bodies are dematerialized, reduced to formal elements, and arranged in an assemblage that forms a higher whole. 

It can be argued that the two images show two different registers of mobilization and bodily discipline. What they do have in common, however, is an affinity with the figuring of modern women as lifeless, serially produced replicants, a trope found across diverse visual and discursive fields. I have argued elsewhere that this proliferation of images of machine women should be read as the symbolic containment of new female subjectivities at the time of unprecedented cultural and economic mobility.[40] The mannequin girls were persistently described as automatons, artificial and lacking individuality. Ontological divides were often blurred: manekin or manikin was sometimes used for both display mannequins and human models, without gāru. We can remind ourselves that Fukao Sumako found them “more unpleasant than machines” (Fukao, “Nan to shita mujun!”). In a roundtable discussion on the future hosted by the Asahi, the scientist Ōshima Yoshikiyo opined that until robots became more advanced, mannequin girls came in handy: impassive and soulless, they were the very definition of machine.[41] The writer Satō Haruo (1892–1964) also described them disparagingly as “machines in the shape of a human.”[42] 

The mannequin, however, could also be a sociocultural hieroglyph for the logics of instrumentalism and rationalization and the becoming-machine of the human body. The fears and excitements unleashed by these processes could be co-opted by different ideological imaginaries. In Japan, the devastating 1923 earthquake spurred a movement for so-called “cultural living” (bunka seikatsu). Inspired by both Fordist mass production and Soviet Russia, “cultural living” was envisioned as modern and efficient. Clothing, housing, and food became objects of state reform; the technocratic rationality of modernity was penetrating previously private spaces and practices. By the mid-1930s, “cultural living” was linked to lifestyles supporting national defense and incorporated into a state-led strategy for industrial rationalization and volume production.[43] An explicit form of biopolitical mobilization, it was often framed as an appeal to modernity. An article in the magazine Fasshon (Fashion) from 1935 titled “Let’s Streamline our Bodies!” offers a fascinating example. The article emphasizes posture and slimness and criticizes “hav[ing] a tire hanging from their waist” and “hunched back[s]”: “This is the streamlined age”, it declares. “Streamline, streamline! A car, a building, kimono or Western clothing, everything now has a streamlined shape, but are our bodies being left behind?”[44] Women’s bodies here are allied to modern industrial production and placed in the same order as the products of technology, architecture, and clothing. The models were quite literally the poster girls for this streamlining of female bodies, aligned with slick technology and modernist designs. Proportional, slim, physically fit, they could easily be integrated into a body politic preparing for total war. 

“From Decadence to Wholesomeness”

The surveillance of women’s bodies, both state-mandated and grass-rooted, played an important role in national mobilization. Military activists and civilian vigilantes would regularly reprimand women on Ginza for their western fashions or ostentatious kimonos. On the street children would pursue coiffed women and chant “Let’s get rid of perms!”, a phenomenon significant enough to be noted in Katō Hidetoshi’s social history of Japan. In the words of historical sociologist Minami Hiroshi, the military “trampled” on women.[45] Recent scholarship, however, has complicated the image of the years 1937–45 beyond a homogenous topography of oppression and privation. Historians have demonstrated that national mobilization contributed to the expansion of the modes of state-sanctioned femininity beyond the maternal and domestic to include women’s physical fitness and social activity in the service of empire. It also brought about an unparalleled presence of women in public life.[46]

The mannequin girls were targeted by the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement and its campaigns to enforce Japanese-inflected conformity and thrift. In July 1938 the Ministry of Manufacturing and Commerce held “friendly conversations” (kondan) with department stores. The officials emphasized that the promotion of fashion, the use of live models, and the encouragement of consumption in general were undesirable and that department stores had to instill a spirit of austerity instead.[47] Annika Culver has observed that in the early 1940s even stylized human forms in advertising graphics became more conspicuously Japanese (Culver, “For the Sake of the Nation”, 169). Mannequin dolls, previously modeled after Hollywood stars, also had to change. Their luscious, free-flowing blonde hair was dyed and cut into more modest styles; eyes were painted brown and high heels were replaced by cheap sandals. Surrealist show window arrangements featuring dismembered body parts were also discouraged. “From decadence to wholesomeness” is how the Asahi newspaper summed up these transformations.[48] 

Consumer culture, however, was not a passive victim of the state’s hegemonization of everyday life. For domestic manufacturers and department stores, social mobilization presented “an unprecedented opportunity for profit,” as Gennifer Weisenfeld has observed, because of the banning of imports.[49] Profit considerations persisted alongside various drives to channel consumption within acceptable ideological frameworks. Until the beginning of the Pacific War there were very few outright bans (such as that on night-time shop opening). According to Maruyama Miyoko, department stores were simply encouraged to exercise voluntary self-restraint: to refrain from large-scale sales and from promoting new-year and mid-year gifts, for example, and to tone down their use of neon. Importantly for my study, Maruyama stresses that the “friendly conversations” between officials and department stores did not at all mean that mannequin work decreased. The Tokyo Mannequin Club continued its activities even amidst rationing and various other restrictions until November 1944, when the air raids over Tokyo intensified (Maruyama, “Manekin gāru,” 195, 198, 209, 221). The type of engagements changed—there was a lot of work in photo advertising, for example. Mannequin girls still promoted products in department stores, although these were not luxury goods and high fashion, but things like pouches and bags, practical items that could rationalize everyday life in preparation for total war (Maruyama, “Manekin gāru,” 209, 221, 208). Ever since the late Meiji period (1868–1912) the vibrant visual cultures of the department stores and their active marketing had reached constituencies conventionally alienated from politics, such as women and children. As Noriko Aso has argued, their success in producing imperial publics enabled the subsequent mobilization of these groups by the state (Aso, Public Properties, 171). Figures of identification, the mannequin girls modeled appropriate regimes of consumption and contributed to the making of women into patriotic subjects.

Historians suggest that in the years 1937–39, frugality campaigns and public reprimands on the Ginza were ignored by most urban women and hardly affected overall consumption.[50] Consumption as pleasure, as excess not contained in officially sanctioned frameworks, seems to have persisted—another element that adds tensions and complexities to the narrative of the 1930s. It was practiced privately by the mannequin girls as well. Maruyama reminisces that even after the introduction of rice rationing in 1941, the models still managed to get hold of delicacies such as anmitsu (beans with gelatin and fruit cubes, doused in syrup) through their connections with sweet shops—though they had to use coded language with the owner if other customers were around (Maruyama, Manekin gāru, 209).

According to the Asahi, the models who performed emperor worship outside the Nijūbashi palace gate belonged to the Nihon Mannequin Club and were led by its manager, Yamano Chieko. We don’t know enough about them as historical agents to be able to discern their motivations and loyalties. Maruyama Miyoko, however, is keen to stress: “we worked with all our strength for the country”—even though her memoir was written long after the war, in 1987, when there was no need for self-censorship (Maruyama, Manekin gāru, 209).We also have evidence that other urban working women actively supported the war:  café waitresses—quintessential modern girls and chief protagonists in the performance of modern life played out on Ginza—raised extraordinarily large sums for war relief.[51] Similarly to the much-studied phenomenon of tenkō (ideological conversion) of contemporary intellectuals who abandoned Marxism and liberalism, the complicated psychic and ideological dynamics involved cannot be contained within rigid binaries of submission and resistance.[52] Coercion and self-mobilization, control and agency were most likely woven together, in formations that are difficult to disentangle. 

Through their performances, writings, and actions elite models like Komai Reiko and Takashima Kyōko intervened in gendered visual and social economies. In the complex ideological terrain of the 1930s and wartime, however, the mannequin girls also embodied the continuities between vernacular modernism and social mobilization on a structural and aesthetic level, beyond historical agency. They could become conduits for diverse social imaginaries. Ciphers of the fears and anxieties precipitated by rationalized modernity and the advance of women, the models could also personify the dynamism the nation needed in preparation for total war. Their beauty could be summoned to enhance the appeal of imperial ideology. They represent the complex and contradictory gender politics of this particular historical moment and the multiplicity of engagements that converged on the female body.

Notes

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. An early version of this article was presented at the online workshop “Gendering Fascism: Imaginaries, Media, Technologies” organized by the University of Düsseldorf in July 2021. I thank the organizers, Andrea Germer and Jasmin Rückert, for their productive input. A Leverhulme Research Fellowship funded a research trip to Japan in 2019. I thank Ōki Toshiyuki, former director of the Shiseido Corporate Museum, and curator Koizumi Chikako for arranging my visit to the museum and for facilitating access to Shiseido publications such as Shiseido Graph and Shiseido Geppō. I am  grateful to the current director Ōhata Masahiro for the kind permission to use images and to curator Ichikawa Yoshika for providing high-quality scans. I also thank Janet Hunter for advice on historic currency equivalents. 

[1] “Manekinjō aikoku hōshi (The Patriotic Service of the Mannequin Ladies),” Asahi shinbun, July 31, 1937, 3. All translations from the Japanese are mine unless otherwise indicated.

[2] For an account of the “China Incident” and the beginning of the war see Mark Peattie, “The Dragon’s Seed: Origins of the War,” in The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, ed. Mark Peattie, Edward J. Drea and Hans van de Ven (Stanford University Press, 2010), 48–78.

[3] For models in the Euro-American context during the interwar years, see the work of Caroline Evans, especially The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (Yale University Press, 2013) and “Living Dolls: Mannequins, Models and Modernity,” in The Body Politic: The Role of the Body and Contemporary Craft, ed. Julian Stair (Crafts Council, 2000), 103–16. For scholarship on the mannequin girl in in French and Japanese see Irena Hayter, “Retour sur la modan gāru: spectacle, politique, subjectivité (About the Modern Girl, Again: Spectacle, Politics, Subjectivity),” in Modan: la ville, le corps et le genre dans le Japon de l’entre-deux-guerres (Modan: City, Body and Gender in Interwar Japan), ed. Sandra Schaal (Éditions Philippe Picquier, 2021), 65–99; and Nagai Yoshihisa, “Manekin gāru: shō uindō o meguru seijigaku (Mannequin Girl: The Politics of the Show Window),” Meiji daigaku Nihon bungaku 32 (2003): 28–44. Inoue Shōichi’s Ningyō no yūwaku: manekineko kara kāneru Sandāsu made (The Allure of the Doll: From Beckoning Cats to Colonel Sanders), (Sanseidō, 1998) has a chapter on mannequin dolls and fashion models (128–76). Ikuta Makoto includes an entry on the mannequin girl in his Modan gāru daizukan (The Modern Girl: An Illustrated Reference Book), (Kawade shobō shinsha, 2012), 38. In English, Rebecca Ann Nickerson touches on Komai Reiko’s career as a mannequin girl but her focus is Komai’s subsequent work as a make-up consultant for Shiseido. See her “Imperial Designs: Fashion, Cosmetics, and Cultural Identity in Japan, 1931–1943” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011), 119–20. Komiya Shigemi has a detailed article on Komai Reiko that covers her early career as a model: “Komai Reiko to ‘Misu Shiseidō’: sono tanjō to katsudō no kiseki (zenhen) (Komai Reiko and the “Miss Shiseido” Consultants: Their Beginnings and Their Activities: Part I),” Eudermine 19 (2012): 142–64.

[4] See Noriko Aso, “Consuming Publics” in Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan (Duke University Press, 2013), 169–202; Annika A. Culver, “Battlefield Comforts of Home: Gendered Commercialization of the Military Care Package in Wartime Japan, 1937–1945,” in Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War, ed. W. Puck Brecher and Michael W. Myers (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), 85–103; “‘For the Sake of the Nation’: Mobilizing for War in Japanese Commercial Advertisements,1937–1945,” in The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Comparative Perspective, ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Jan Logemann, and Felix Römer, (Oxford University Press, 2017), 145–74; and Max Ward, “Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibition of 1938,” Critical Asian Studies 47, no. 3 (2015): 414–39, among others. 

[5] In nihonga Japanese-style painting a new “machine-ist aesthetic” with militarist overtones associated traditional female images with advanced technology while representations of athletic women deviated from received ideals of gentle maternal femininity, showing instead the importance of physical fitness for the empire. See Asato Ikeda, “Modern Girls and Militarism: Japanese Style Machine-Ist Paintings, 1935–1940,” in Art and War in Japan and Its Empire: 1931–1960, ed. Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo (Brill, 2012), 91–109; and Alison J. Miller,  “Wintry Women: Skiing, Modern Girls, and the Body Politics of Sport as Represented in 1930s Nihonga,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 47, no. 2 (2021): 313–48.

[6] Gennifer Weisenfeld, for example, finds in the cultures of air defense “entertainment, spectacle, eroticism, style and sensorial stimulation.” See her Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023). 

[7] Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77, 60. 

[8] Kyoko Omori “‘Inter-Mediating’ Global Modernity: Benshi Film Narrators, Multisensory Performance, and Fan Culture,” in Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa, (Routledge, 2020), 198–212, 203.

[9] See Iwamoto Kenji, “Modanizumu to Nihon eiga,” in Nihon eiga to modanizumu, ed. Iwamoto Kenji (Riburopōto, 1991), 6; Omori, “‘Inter-Mediating’”, 202.

[10] Barbara Hamill Sato, “The Moga Sensation: Perceptions of the Modan Gāru in Japanese Intellectual Circles During the 1920s,” Gender & History 5, no. 3 (1993): 363–81, 364. 

[11] The imperial Japanese state institutionalized a rigidly gendered division of production and reproduction: the public sphere belonged to a socially active male subject tasked with the project of modernity while women were confined to the domestic. The ideal of the “good wife and wise mother” was an amalgam of inherited Confucian precepts and imported nineteenth-century European ideas of domesticity. Inculcated through the education system, it emphasized modesty, frugality and obedience to father and husband. See Koyama Shizuko, Ryōsai Kenbo: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan (Brill, 2012); and Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy Toward Women, 1890–1910,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (University of California Press, 1991), 151–74. 

[12] Margit Nagy, “Middle-Class Working Women During the Interwar Years,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (University of California Press, 1991), 199–216, 200. 

[13] This argument is articulated most compellingly by Miriam Silverberg in Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (University of California Press, 2006), 51; and Dina Lowy in The Japanese “New Woman”: Images of Gender and Modernity (Rutgers University Press, 2007), 129.

[14] Takami Jun, “Kokyū wasureu beki (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot),” in Takami Jun zenshū (Collected Works of Takami Jun), (Keisō shobō, 1970), 81. Takami’s novel was shortlisted for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, in its inaugural year of 1935.

[15] “Modan ryūkōgo jiten (Lexicon of Fashionable Modern Terms),” Fujin kōron 15, no. 10 (1930): 377, 355, 376.

[16] Komiya Shigemi confirms that Hasegawa Kiyoko was one of the Marubishi models (“Komai Reiko and the ‘Miss Shiseido’ Consultants”, 149).

[17] [Hasegawa] Kiyoko, “Manekin seikatsu no hatsukakan (My Twenty Days as a Model),” Fujokai 39, no. 2 (1929): 212–13.

[18] Hirasawa Makoto, “Mannequin gāru to sono kōkoku kōka (Mannequin Girls and their Effectiveness as Advertising,” Jitsugyō no Nihon 32, no. 7 (1929): 172. In comparison, American and French fashion models moved. Daily mannequin promenades, early incarnations of the fashion show, were staged for department store customers (Evans, “Living Dolls,” 105).

[19] Katsuoka Tsuneji, “Otoko manekin (Mannequin Man),” Fujin saron 2, no. 6 (1930): 62.

[20] “Jidai no toppu o kiru, ugoku ningyō manikin (On the Cutting Edge of Our Time: Moving Doll Mannequins),” Yomiuri shinbun, December 3, 1928, 3.

[21] Yoneda Akira, “Manekin gāru (Mannequin Girl),” Bungei sensen 6, no. 9 (1929): 164.

[22] Fukao Sumako, “Nan to shita mujun! (What a Contradiction!),” Yomiuri shinbun, July 2, 1929, 2.

[23] Yagi Akiko, “Kotoba: hyōgen (Words: Expressions),” Nyonin geijutsu 2, no. 1 (1929): 105.

[24] Maruyama Miyoko, Manekin gāru: shijin no tsuma no Shōwashi (Mannequin Girl: A History of Showa by a Poet’s Wife) (Jiji tsūshinsha, 1984), 113.

[25] See for example, Hanayagi Tomomi et al., “Natsu no keshō ni tsuite (On Summer Make-Up),” Fujin kurabu 12, no. 8 (1931): 278–83; also “Ninki no hitobito no furo biyōhō (The Bath Beauty Routines of Famous People),” Fujin kurabu 13, no. 8 (1932): 380–84.

[26] This availability of written sources forms a striking contrast with the Anglo-American case, where real historical models have proven frustratingly hard to trace (Evans, The Mechanical Smile, 8).

[27] “Manekin ni kiku (Asking the Mannequins),” Fujin bungei 14, no. 1 (1929): 173.

[28] Quoted in Kon Wajirō, Shinpan dai Tokyo annai (A New Edition Guide to Greater Tokyo) (Chūō kōronsha, 1929), 291.

[29] “Tsuji ni atta manekin (The Mannequins We Met on the Street),” Asahi graph, March 4, 1931, 7.

[30] Takashima Kyōko, “Manekin no mita dansei (Men as Seen by a Mannequin),” Fujin gahō, no. 292 (1929): 148–49.

[31] Takashima Kyōko, “Manekin mango (Mannequin Ramblings),” Osaka Asahi, July 6, 1929, 8.

[32] Komai Reiko, “Manekin no uchiake banashi (Mannequin Confidential),” Fujokai 44, no. 4 (1931): 71.

[33] Akabane Katsumi, “Manekin haranki (Records of the Mannequin Troubles),” Fujin saron 7, no. 3 (1931): 215.

[34] Kon, Shinpan, 290; Sasaki Fusa et al., “Shokugyō fujin no seikatsu uchiake zadankai: atarashii jidai no sentan o iku (Roundtable Discussion: Revealing the Lives of Working Women—In the Avant-Garde of the New Age),” Fujin sekai 25, no. 1 (1930): 50; Maruyama, Manekin gāru, 50. On the shop assistant see Elise K. Tipton, “Moving Up and Out: The ‘Shop Girl’ in Interwar Japan,” in Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan, ed. Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller, and Christine R. Yano (Stanford University Press, 2013), 21–40; and Irena Hayter, “Modernism, Gender and Consumer Spectacle in 1920s’ Tokyo.” Japan Forum 27, no. 4 (2015): 454–75. On the dance floor girl, see Vera Mackie, “Sweat, Perfume, and Tobacco: The Ambivalent Labor of the Dancehall Girl,” in Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility and Labor in Japan, ed. Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller, and Christine Yano (Stanford University Press, 2013), 67–82.

[35] See Barak Kushner, “Advertising as Propaganda,” in The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006): 68–84. Reading Max Ward’s study of the hugely popular “thought war exhibition”, organized in 1938 by the Takashimaya department store in tandem with the Cabinet Information Bureau, one is struck by its incorporation of the visual rhetoric of consumer spectacle—such as the use of display cases and neon lighting. Located on the eighth floor of the Takashimaya flagship store in Tokyo, the exhibition ensured continuity with the haptic and kinaesthetic experience of the department store. There was a strong element of commercialism, with visitors invited to buy memorabilia from the gift shop (Ward, “Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism”).

[36] Alison J. Miller reaches a similar conclusion, in a different analytical context and using a different archive: “Over the course of the 1930s, images of women skiing transitioned from a focus on feminine fashion and leisure to one of physical fitness in service to the empire.” (“Wintry Women,” 319). 

[37] See Hara Takeshi, Kashika sareta teikoku: kindai Nihon no gyōkōkei (The Empire Made Visible: The Imperial Processions of Modern Japan) (Misuzu shobō, 2001), 348.

[38] Quoted in Hashikawa Bunzō, Shōwa ishin no ronri to shinri (The Logic and Psychology of the Showa Restoration), in Kindai Nihon seiji shisōshi, ed. Hashikawa Bunzō and Matsumoto Sannosuke, vol. 2 (Yūhikaku, 1970), 213.

[39] The notion of fascist spectacle is central to Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi’s work on the aesthetization of the public sphere in Italy which, following Walter Benjamin, she sees as central to workings of fascism. Drawing also on Guy Debord’s theorization of the concept, Falasca-Zamponi argues that fascist spectacle mediates, but also hides. See her Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (University of California Press, 1997). 

[40] Irena Hayter, “Robotics, Science Fiction and the Search for the Perfect Artificial Woman,” The Conversation, October 24, 2017, theconversation.com/robotics-science-fiction-and-the-search-for-the-perfect-artificial-woman-86092.

[41] Nii Itaru et al., “Mirai o kataru kūsō zadankai 4: jinzō ningen (Roundtable: Visions of the Future),” Asahi shinbun, 13 July 1929, 5.

[42] Satō Haruo, “Bibō zakkishō (Miscellaneous Notes and Reminders),” Asahi shinbun, October 20, 1933, 9.

[43] See Kashiwagi Hiroshi, “On Rationalization and the National Lifestyle: Japanese Design in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, ed. Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (University of Hawai'i Press, 2000), 61–74, 72. 

[44] Quoted in Lois E. J. Barnett, Film and Fashion in Japan, 1923–39: Consuming the ‘West’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 130.

[45] Elise K. Tipton, Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (Routledge, 2002), 135; Katō Hidetoshi, Meiji Taishō Shōwa sesōshi (A Social History of Meiji, Taisho and Showa) ( Shakai shisōsha, 1967), 256–57; Minami Hiroshi and Shakai shinri kenkūjo, Shōwa bunka 1925–1945 (Showa Culture 1925–1945) (Keisō shobō, 1987), 155.

[46] See Miller, “Wintry Girls.” Nishikawa Yūko has shown that national and regional bureaucracies were increasingly staffed by women, their numbers peaking in 1939, see “Japan's Entry into War and the Support of Women,” US–Japan Women’s Journal: English Supplement no. 12 (1997): 48–83, 59. Ethan Mark stresses that the opportunities for social participation afforded to rural women by mass mobilization movements were nothing short of revolutionary. See “Japan’s 1930s: Crisis, Fascism, and Social Imperialism” in Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History, ed. Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman (Routledge, 2017), 237–50, 246. 

[47] “Hyakkaten no uriba kara ‘ryūkō’ sugata o kesu (‘Fashion’ Disappears from Department Stores Counters),”Asahi shinbun, July 19, 1938, 2.

[48] “Manekin no kao mo kokusuika (Mannequin Faces Also Affected by Ultra-Nationalism),” Asahi shinbun, July 28, 1940, 7; “Manekin ningyō no kami ni mo ‘kansobi’ (“Austere Beauty” Applied Even to Mannequin Dolls’ Hair),” Asahi shinbun, April 5, 1941, 7.

[49] Weisenfeld, Gas Mask Nation, 42-97. See also the sources cited in note 4 of this article. The care package (imonbukuro) phenomenon, extensively studied by Annika Culver, is a potent example of how profits could be expanded with consumption contained within collective regimes. Culver stresses its gendered character, with women and sometimes children deliberately targeted by advertising. Destined for Japanese soldiers in China, the care packages contained items such as canned goods, candy, cigarettes, and toiletries. Buying for the troops transcended self-indulgence, but at the same time obligation could be enmeshed with gratification. As she observes, the act could provide the “synchronous pleasure” of consuming the same products as the troops and helping raise morale. See Annika A. Culver, Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), 130.

[50] See, for example, Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque, 76; and Tipton, Modern Japan, 135. 

[51] Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (University of California Press, 1998), 172–73. 

[52] For an overview of the debates on tenkō see Irena Hayter and Mark Williams, “Introduction: Tenkō – Modernity, Empire, Japan,” in Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan, ed. Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos, and Mark Williams (Routledge, 2021), xx–xliii.