Civilizing Japanese Bodies: A History of Self-Improvement and the Beauty Industry in the Japanese Empire, 1868-1945

Takayama Mouchel, Emilie Yuki

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-dwxx-dd06

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Civilizing Japanese Bodies: A History of Self-Improvement and the Beauty Industry in the Japanese Empire, 1868-1945

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This dissertation is a social and cultural history of the body and the beauty industry in the Japanese Empire from 1868 to 1945. The emphasis is on the thoughts and actions of state and private actors such as doctors and the first generation of Japanese cosmetic product developers. When these actors began promoting new beauty ideals, they were also constructing the cultural underpinnings of what eventually evolved into a vibrant beauty industry. By the early 1920s they not only served the mainland but also its colonies in East Asia. This dissertation traces how and why at that particular moment the modern Japanese industry developed and how precisely its existence became legitimized and then evolved. It examines how the modern identity of the constituents of the Japanese Empire were constructed both politically and commercially, and how that played out in the mass-market for goods and services. It demonstrates how entrepreneurs promoted various discourses on bourgeois virtues, such as the striving for social prestige, as well as how specific ideas about the intersection of bodily markers and consumerism, race, gender, and colonialism developed in the context of imperial Japan and its most important colony, Korea. This research explains why Japanese felt the need to spend their disposable income on beauty products and, in some cases, resort to extreme measures such as cosmetic surgery. Using a wide array of sources such as corporate reports, advertisements, newspaper articles, biographies of doctors and opinion pieces, this dissertation explains ideas surrounding the body changed with modernity.

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