| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Barbara Sato. The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan. (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2003. Pp. xiv, 241. $19.95.
The emergence of mass culture in Japan has been the subject of a number of interesting books and anthologies in recent years, generating larger discussions about the meanings of "modernity" in early twentieth-century Japanese society. Barbara Sato's wonderfully illustrated book adds to this discussion by focusing on women in Japan's new middle class. The "modern girl" (moga) who has been central to narratives of the interwar period is joined, or overshadowed, here by the presence of two other, larger groups: middle-class housewives and professional working women. While the moga's resistance was played out in very public urban arenas, and was memorialized on a daily basis by the Japanese press, Sato sees the transformation of housewives and working women as a much more subtle, but perhaps even more important, development.	1
If consumption was the marker of Japan's new middle class, it was most visible among these groups of middle-class women who, between department store shopping trips and visits to urban cafés, read the expanding number and variety of women's magazines available to them in this period. Sato's extensive investigation of these magazines leads her to conclude that they were the primary generators of the public perception of "mass culture" as a synonym for "women's culture" in the 1920s when "women and consumption defined each other through the dominance of women's magazines over the mass cultural landscape" (p. 95).	. . .

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