Abstract
From the late Meiji era through the early Showa period, Japanese culture not only adopted industrialization from the imperial West, but also exchanged radical artistic practices. Along with artistic modernism arose the modern woman, whose nudity became an emblem for avant-garde artists and whose independent style became a culturally recognized icon in fashion and popular visual culture in Japan. This modern girl (modan garu or moga) stood between the two Japans of traditional aesthetics and new aesthetic experiments. As Japanese cinema developed, this moga became a visual sign of dynamic social practices for continually evolving definitions of modernity. Japanese avant-garde, then, must be considered as a gendered culturation, since all of the prevailing new art forms that emerged from the Edo period to the present have relied upon female figures—the geisha, courtesan, new woman, and the moga—as expressions of the novelty of the visual aesthetic.
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Pettey, H.B. (2017). Japanese Avant-garde and the Moga (“Modern Girl”). In: Grossman, J., Palmer, R. (eds) Adaptation in Visual Culture. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58580-2_13
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