July meeting of the Kyoto Asian Studies Group: "Mediating Women's Lives in Early Twentieth-Century Japan: Visual Advertising in Department-Store and Women's Magazines"

Announcement from H-ASIA:

The speaker for the June meeting of the Kyoto Asian Studies Group is Julia  Sapin, who will present "Mediating Women's Lives in Early Twentieth-Century Japan: Visual Advertising in Department-Store and Women's Magazines."

The lecture will be held on Tuesday, July 12th from 6:30-8:30 in Room 213  of the Fusokan on the Doshisha University Campus (see link below for access information).

Abstract

Women became a target for advertisers in early twentieth-century Japan and  thus a primary market for social trends that were mirrored in these commercial ventures. The kimono shops that would become Japan's first department stores were among advertising's biggest users, producing posters, flyers, postcards, and publicity magazines that employed bold and novel visual elements for their power of persuasion. Department-store magazines have been a little-studied aspect of the department-store advertising machine and their similarities to women's magazines have also been overlooked. The first women's magazines predated department store magazines, but the most prominent and representative examples of the former, such as Fujin koron (1916) and Shufu no tomo (1917), did not develop until after the big department stores had launched their publicity magazines. This paper compares these two media, considering their textual content, but focusing primarily on how they incorporated visual forms to achieve their primary objectives. While on the surface it would seem that these two media had very different aims, they were actually rather similar in terms of their visual framing of possibilities for women's lives, offering alternatives to the government-prescribed notion of womanhood.

Julia Sapin is Associate Professor of Art History at the Department of Art at Western Washington University.

Sponsored by the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies.

For access information see:
http://www.doshisha.ac.jp/english/access/ima_campus.html