Decent Housewives and Sensual White Women : Representations of Women in Postwar Japanese Magazines

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This paper examines how Japanese women have been portrayed in photographs and pictures in Japanese women's magazines during the 52 years following the Second World War. I use iconographic material because it is the most suitable method to study gender roles which subtly combine a variety of elements, and because the cultural integration of postwar popular society would have been impossible without visual media. I chose Shufu no Tomo, Josei Jishin, and non-no as representative magazines of the periods 1945-60, 1960-75 and 1975-present, respectively. I discovered two keys to understanding the development of visual images of women in postwar Japan. The first one is the formation and transformation of the "postwar system of gender roles," where the standardization of the role as housewife was an important factor. The second one is the dichotomy between sensual white women versus healthy Japanese women. The representation of women was not solely determined by the actual gender relationship but also by various social factors including national identity and economic power balance.
International Research Center for Japanese Studiesの論文