Essay on the Japan The Modern Girl as Militant Discussing free essay sample

In Japan, the images of women have undergone rather remarkable transitional changes. In her article The Modern Girl as Militant, Miriam Silverberry focuses on the category of Modern Girl (mega, or modal gaur), a topic of debate in Japanese society during the sass and early sass. She argues that the Modern Girl was a media creation designed to portray women as promiscuous and apolitical. It was a way of displacing the militancy expressed in their political activity, her labor in new arenas and their adoption of new fashions.Therefore, when examine the history of Japanese women during that era, the Astoria should not be trapped in viewing her as just an epitome of moral decadence, but rather should become conscious of her militant nature. This paper begins by focusing on some of Silverwares strong arguments, which defends her position on the Image of Modern Girl as militant . I would then proceed to highlight some ambiguities and questions with regards to her arguments. Silverberry begins her paper by asserting that the Modern Girl was a highly commodities cultural construct crafted by Journalist during the decade of cultural and social change.She then proceed to discuss some of the contemporaries such as Swastika Chichi, Mini Atari, Kiddush, Kate Tiepin etc. , who tried to define the characteristics of the Modern Girl. Despite the fact the contemporaries writing about the Modern Girl struggle to find an absolute definition, the essence of who the Modern Girl remains clear to society. The Modern Girl stood for everything modern and non-Japanese. It stood for all the materialism and decadence in Japanese society at that period, and all modern ideals and lifestyle that threatened the traditional social order of Japan.It was a conservative construct, a symbol of what women should to be, and a reflection of the negative social phenomena In Japans modernization process. However, Silverberry argues against that the true reality of the Modern Girl was In fact militant. She claimed that there was an increased in plasticization of Japanese women during the sass to sass. For example, there was an emergence of militant feminist organizations such as the New Womans Association (1919) and the Red Wave Society (1921) .Silverberry also highlights that women were active in the labor movement, with the setting up of many unions and professional organizations that dealt with the robbers in some of the female-dominated occupations. Women also took part in strikes, such as the Toy Muslin strike and Florida Dance Hall strike, with some strikes I OFF threatening emergence of the Modern Girl coincided with a debate on the possible revision of the Meijer Civil Code. According to Silverberry, the media and the government therefore sought to downplay the militancy of Japanese women by defining her image as apolitical and promiscuous.In this way, they are made to be less of a threat and easier to manage. By portraying them as decadent women who lacked any social consciousness, they an be easily discredited with the use of moral rhetoric and their increasing political demands can be denied . While Silverwares article presents the reader with an alternative view of the image of Modern Girl during that era, the article only reaffirms a problematic discourse with regards to the history and identity of Japanese women as they are constantly being defined and redefined by either the historian, or by the government in its policies.Who should we rely to better comprehend this modern Japanese women? It further becomes more complicated when we recognized that women can take on multiply densities. She can be political, as well as fashionable. By limiting the definition of the Modern Girl as either militant or apolitical, we might inevitably begin to talk about them as though they formed a monolithic group with fixed characteristics. Even within one historical period, there are countless roles within Japanese women, such as the upper-class woman, the merchant woman, the farmer, the student etc. Which would give rise to countless behaviors, thoughts and experiences. One could therefore argue that most Modern Girls were probably Just simple wage-earners irking in the cities, rather than living the lifestyle of the modal gaur the media depicted, or even the active political activists that Silverberry portrayed them to be. The article might become problematic if the reader senses an absolute position on the image of the Modern Girl, which can never hold true. Another problem in Silverwares argument is that she has failed to define what militant is. Does militant necessarily mean illegal or violent?Does it mean acts of social and political bellicosity? Some historian define militant as tactics that are sufficiently combative and widely regarded as shocking. The definition of militant is crucial as it would set the bo undaries of how we would view and consider the modern Japanese women, as described by Silverberry. Moreover, this militant attitude might not be truly representative of majority of the female population who living in this modernization period. Silverberry had highlighted that by the end of 1928; almost 12,010 women had Joined the labor movement.Statistics shows that the total female labor force was about 933,000 during the early sass. That means that approximately only 1. 2% of the women took part in any labor movement. These figures constitute that the militant women was a minority rather than a majority. In addition, it is important to note that majority of the strikes where women participated occurred after 1930, the period of the Great the strikes were sudden in nature, and due to the harsh economic conditions in Japan, rather than seen as a prevailing aggressive attitude that has dominated a section of the Japanese women from the sass to the sass?In conclusion, despite the many questions raised over Silverwares article, it still remains an important academic research as it p resents to us the multivalent symbol f the Modern Girl. Depending on the perceiver, the Modern Girl presents to us many models. On one hand, it can come to portray all the paradoxical values that were pulling Japanese society part, an emblem for threats to tradition. On the other hand, the Modern Girl could be seen as a negative cultural construct by the media to hide the real identity of the Modern Girl in Japan, which defined by Silverberry, was militant in character. In both cases, the description of the Modern Girl becomes a creation of either the media or the historian. As gender is a socially constructed and laterally transmitted organizer of our inner and outer worlds, this definition of the Modern Girl will continue to be an ongoing, dynamic and even problematic process.