The empire of fashion: Taste, gender, and nation in modern Japan

This dissertation explores the relationship between nationalism and everyday life through the categories of taste and style in order to understand the construction of gender identity and the invention of national culture in modern Japan. With the development of capitalism and the hegemony of fashion in Meiji Japan, the spread of Western tastes and styles was perceived as having disrupted normative conceptions of taste and national identity. Fads (ryuko ) promoted the process of Westernization and, by atomizing the experience of everyday life into discontinuous moments, disrupted the authority of "tradition." Because fashion represents the negation of the power of tradition though the process of forgetting the past, the experience of rapid changes in taste and style in prewar Japan reveals the way in which the thirst for novelty and the seduction of the ephemeral came to penetrate social and cultural life in modern Japan. However, as fashion exhausted itself through a constant process of striving for novelty, cultural critics and intellectuals compensated for the effect of forgetting by constructing a new awareness of the mundane and quotidian as the experience of an authentic modernity.; Following from the work of Henri Lefebvre, I emphasize how the impact of capitalism and the intensification of fashion created a new awareness of the concept of everyday life in modern Japan. I analyze the way in which a peripheral elite disaffected with the government criticized the excessive Westernizing tendencies of the Japanese state and promoted the congruity of everyday life and national culture through the "invention of tradition." In this way, they constructed an aesthetic of everyday life as a cultural tradition to reinforce a shared sense of national identity. My analysis thus centers on a process of contesting nationalisms, whereby the cultural nation was imagined in opposition to the modern, rational state. As a consequence, a shared cultural identity was invented through the commercialization and consumption of tradition and the aestheticization of the culture of everyday life.