The Image of Woman as a National Icon in Modern Japanese Art: 1890s-1930s

In the 1890s, the Meiji government established its Japanese constitution. After the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, Japan colonised Taiwan and Korea and increased its military power. The Japanese artists who lived during this time were in many ways reacting to this rapid social change that was taking place.

This thesis aims to analyse the diverse images of women that were primarily produced by artists working under the government regime and to show how these artists seek to resolve through their work the tensions to which modernity, nation and empire give rise. My discussion begins with the French-trained Japanese painter, Kuroda Seiki, who introduced life class to Japan after he became the head of the Department of Western Art at the Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1896. He also introduced the studio fraternity of male artists to Japan and encouraged students to paint female nudes to catch up with the standards set by Western art. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Okada SaburOsuke and Wada Eisaku created images of "kimono beauty" by internalising the Westernern gaze on Japanese women in kimonos as exotic objects. The Mitsui kimono shop promoted newly designed kimonos for bourgeois women as a "national dress." They popularised kimono beauty with their products in print and billboards. These images had a major influence on nihonga artists of the 191 Os, which led to the vogue of Bijin-ga (paintings of beautiful women).

As Japan expanded its territory in East Asia, Japanese artists needed to create new icons of Japan. Fujishima Takeji expressed t6y6 seishin (spirit of the East) in the 1920s by using images of women in Chinese dress that symbolised a modernised Japan that was the counterpart of the West. After the Japanese invasion of China, a vogue of images of women in modern Chinese dress appeared in the 1930s. Artists who had been to Europe in the 1920s rediscovered the beauty of Japanese nature and life while simultaneously depicting Japanese subalterns by humble images of their women. Contrasted with these, images of kimono beauty in the 1930s distinguished themselves through expressions of urbanity and prosperity. Examples of kimono beauty produced by female painters at the end of the 1930s reveal that they themselves as well as the images that they produced were incorporated within the imperial regime.

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