Ginza, late afternoon, a young woman in bobbed hair and a Western dress walks past gas lamps and brick buildings, accompanied by a man in a three-piece suit and homburg hat; they enter a café, where a jazz record plays on a gramophone and the jokyuu (waitresses) lean in to light the customers’ cigarettes. This is the standardised visual image of Taisho Roman, the cultural current that defined Japan’s Taisho period (1912–1926). Behind the visual surface, the period was the site of substantial intellectual and social work on love, sexual freedom, birth control, and the modern Japanese understanding of the body.

Taisho Roman (大正ロマン) is the encompassing label for the cultural current of Japan’s Taisho period (1912–1926), covering literature, art, urban manners, and intellectual life. The word roman derives from the French roman (novel, romance) and from English romantic, and the compound was coined in this form to designate a cultural register oriented toward feeling, individuality, free love, and aestheticism, in contrast to the harder modernisation drive of the Meiji period (1868–1912) that preceded it. From a history-of-sexuality angle, the period is the major transition point between Meiji-era statism and the wartime regimentation that followed; the article treats the period under this angle.

Overview

The Taisho period sits between the Meiji-era nation-state construction and the militarist Showa-era statism. The fifteen years of the period (1912–1926) produced a relatively open cultural space in which several developments important for the later modern Japanese understanding of sexuality consolidated: the social adoption of ren’ai (romantic love) as a legitimate concept; the emergence of new women’s images (moga, modern girl; jokyuu, café waitress; shokugyou-fujin, working woman); the importation of European sexology and birth-control thought; the organising of birth-control activism around Margaret Sanger’s 1922 visit; and the prehistory of the ero-guro-nansensu mass-culture register that consolidated in the early Showa period.

These developments were carried forward by an unusual concentration of intellectual and cultural energy in the urban centres, particularly Tokyo and Osaka, supported by a rapid expansion of mass media (the major mass-circulation magazines emerged in the period) and by the post-WWI economic conditions that produced both substantial new wealth and substantial new urban migration.

Etymology

Roman (ロマン) is a Japanese phonetic adoption of the French roman (novel; from the medieval romanz, the vernacular romance literature) and the English romantic / romance. The Japanese adaptation entered through the literary criticism of the late Meiji period and was used particularly by writers associated with the Shinshisha (New Poetry Society): Yosano Tekkan, Kitahara Hakushu, and others. The Chinese-character writing roman (浪漫) is sometimes attributed to Mori Ougai as a particular kanji-choice for the loan; the writing is decorative rather than semantic, with the characters chosen for sound.

Taisho Roman as a compound term appears retrospectively rather than as a contemporary self-description. The Taisho-period writers and observers did not generally use the term to describe their own period; the term consolidated in the postwar period as a retrospective label for the cultural register of 1912–1926.

Political and economic context

Post-WWI economic conditions

WWI (1914–1918) produced an unprecedented boom in the Japanese economy, as Japan’s distance from the European theatre allowed Japanese industry to supply export demand that would otherwise have been filled by Europe. The boom produced a wave of new wealth in steel, shipbuilding, and chemicals, with the resulting narikin (new-money) class becoming a recognised social type in the period’s commentary. The wealth supported a substantial new consumption sector in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe, which in turn underwrote the cafe, restaurant, and entertainment ecologies that the period is now associated with.

The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo’s older built environment and produced a rebuilding boom in reinforced-concrete construction, department stores, cafés, and theatres. The post-earthquake Ginza rebuild was the immediate setting for the most-photographed scenes of the period.

Mass media

The Taisho period saw the consolidation of mass-circulation magazine publishing. King (Kodansha, 1923), Shufu no Tomo (1917), and Fujin Kurabu (1920) reached print runs in the hundreds of thousands and, by the late Taisho, over one million. Film, in the transition from silent to early talkie technology, established the cinema as a major urban-entertainment medium with Asakusa and Ginza as its capital-city centres.

The mass media supplied the distribution channel for the new visual representations of women that the period’s cultural memory now centres on: the modern-girl image in magazines and on posters; the jokyuu in film and novels; the working-woman in non-fiction reportage.

Moga and mobo

The modan-gaaru (modern girl, abbreviated moga) appears in 1920s mass media as the typifying new women’s image of the period. The standard moga visual elements were bobbed hair, Western dress (one-piece dresses, knee-length skirts), refined make-up, public smoking, and visible socialising with men in mixed-sex contexts. The term took off in the press from about 1924 onward, with cartoonists including Kitazawa Rakuten producing recurring satirical moga sketches.

The actual statistical incidence of the full moga style was small. The 1925 Ginza street-fashion survey by Moroto Kouichi found Western-dress adoption rates of approximately 67% among men and 1% among women on Ginza street-photo sampling. The moga was therefore a visual minority even on its central Ginza terrain, and the cultural-memory amplification of the moga image is substantially greater than its demographic incidence at the time.

The parallel male image, modan-boi (modern boy, mobo), was the male counterpart: Lloyd glasses, hunting cap, three-piece suit, walking-stick, urban-flaneur stance. The pair moga and mobo operated as the visual standard for the period’s “young people in the modern city” image.

Café culture

The Japanese café (kafee, カフェー, distinct from the modern Japanese kafe coffee shop) developed through the late Meiji and Taisho periods. Initial cafés, including Café Printemps, Café Lion, and Café Paulista (all 1911 Ginza), began as Western-style coffee-houses oriented to literary and intellectual customers. From the 1920s onward, particularly after the 1923 earthquake, the café format shifted toward a jokyuu-centred (waitress-centred) operation.

The shift consolidated in 1929 with the Osaka café Akadama’s introduction of an active waitress-service register that propagated to Tokyo as the “Osaka-fication of the cafés”. Under this register, the jokyuu sat at the customer’s table, lit cigarettes, poured drinks, and engaged in pseudo-romantic conversation; outside-the-café meetings between jokyuu and customer, sometimes involving sexual relations, occurred regularly.

By the early Showa period, Japan had approximately 40,000 cafés operating under this format, distributed nationally with concentrations in Ginza, Shinjuku, and Dotonbori. The format is the direct predecessor of the postwar kyabakura (cabaret-club) industry and a key site for the history of the Japanese pseudo-romantic-service sector.

The jokyuu occupied an ambiguous legal status: classified as a “serving worker” rather than as a regulated prostitute (geisha or shogi), but operating in practice in a register that frequently included sexual relations. The Taisho-period police treated jokyuu-related sex work as informal prostitution and pursued enforcement in specific cases without proscribing the industry overall.

Free-love discourse

Yosano Akiko

The poet Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) had been a major voice in the late Meiji period through her collection Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901), which expressed female sexual subjectivity in a register without precedent in conventional Japanese poetry. Her famous line “Won’t you grant the touch of warm-blooded soft skin / you who lecture on the Way!” (in Midaregami) directly addresses the male moralist establishment from a position of female sexual self-claim.

Yosano remained intellectually active through the Taisho period and was a major participant in the bosei hogo ronsou (maternal-protection debate) of 1918–1919, in which she argued against Hiratsuka Raicho for the priority of women’s economic self-sufficiency over state protection of motherhood. The debate is a foundational moment in modern Japanese feminist intellectual history.

Kuriyagawa Hakuson

The English-literature scholar Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923) published Kindai no ren’ai-kan (The Modern View of Love, 1922), serialised in the Asahi Shimbun and then published as a book. The work introduced the Swedish thinker Ellen Key’s romantic-love thought to Japanese readers under slogans including “Love is best” and “love is the union of soul and body”. The book was a major bestseller and contributed substantially to the Japanese intellectual reception of European romantic-love discourse. The slogan Love is best circulated widely in Taisho youth culture and became one of the rallying-cries of the period’s reception of European-style romantic love.

The structural feature of Taisho-period free-love discourse is that it advanced an idealised romantic-love conception against the backdrop of a substantially unchanged actual marriage and family system. The family-headship and arranged-marriage frameworks remained the operating institutions; the romantic-love discourse operated alongside them as an idealised counter-norm. This gap produced the period’s recurring pattern of love-suicides and elopement scandals, in which the discourse-actual divergence broke at the level of the individual case.

Osugi Sakae and free love in practice

The anarchist Osugi Sakae (1885–1923) put free-love theory into directly visible practice in his concurrent relationships with his wife Hori Yasuko, the journalist Kamichika Ichiko, and the activist Ito Noe. The 1916 Hikage Chaya incident, in which Kamichika stabbed Osugi in a love-related confrontation, brought the situation into the public eye. Osugi’s stated three conditions of relationship (separate residence, economic independence, mutual respect of freedom) were a programmatic statement of the period’s free-love idea. Osugi was murdered by military police in the chaos following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, alongside Ito and a nephew (the Amakasu Incident); his death is conventionally read as the symbolic end of Taisho-period free-love activism.

Birth control

Margaret Sanger’s 1922 visit

The American birth-control activist Margaret Sanger visited Japan in March 1922. The Home Ministry initially refused her entry, but she was eventually admitted and gave lectures in Tokyo, Yokohama, and Kobe. Her book Family Limitation was translated into Japanese the same year (Kaizousha publishers) and circulated knowledge of contraception methods to a Japanese readership that had previously had limited access to such information.

Sanger’s visit catalysed the organisation of Japanese birth-control activism around figures including Yamamoto Sengichi (a lecturer at Kyoto Imperial University), Abe Isoo (a socialist intellectual), and Kato Shidzue (who became Sanger’s direct collaborator and, postwar, an Upper House member). The movement organised import and manufacture of contraceptives, public lectures, and the publication of the journal Sanji Chousetsu Hyouron (Birth Control Review).

Yamamoto Sengichi

Yamamoto Sengichi (1889–1929) was the central organising figure of Japanese birth-control activism through the 1920s. His lecture tours to working-class audiences in Tokyo and the Kansai cities propagated birth-control knowledge as part of a broader programme combining women’s rights, working-class quality-of-life, and population control. His framework brought together medical, social-movement, and political-economic dimensions in a way that was substantially new in Japanese public discourse.

Yamamoto was assassinated by a right-wing activist in 1929. The birth-control movement weakened sharply through the early 1930s under the combined pressure of right-wing violence and the developing pro-natalist state policy.

Early sex education

The Taisho period saw the first public discussion of school-based sex education. Sawada Ken’s Seikyouiku (Sex Education, 1921) advocated systematic provision of sexual knowledge to children, and physicians and social scientists including Takata Giichiro and Honma Hisao developed parallel positions. The actual implementation of school-based sex education did not occur in the Taisho period; it had to wait for the postwar 1947 Junketsu kyouiku (purity education) programme.

Ero-guro-nansensu prehistory

The ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense) mass-culture register of approximately 1929–1933 belongs to the early Showa period, but its institutional preparation took place in the late Taisho period. The cafe culture, the moga image, the free-love discourse, the imported sexology, and the related publishing infrastructure were all set up in 1923–1926 and provided the platform on which the early Showa ero-guro-nansensu register built.

The major early Showa ero-guro publications (Hanzai Kagaku, Ryouki, Kamera) and the major ero-guro writers (Edogawa Rampo, Yumeno Kyusaku, Hisao Juuran) drew on Taisho-period intellectual and visual materials. Miriam Silverberg’s Erotic Grotesque Nonsense (2006) is the major English-language treatment of the relationship between the late-Taisho and early-Showa cultural registers.

Shunga in the period

Shunga, legally proscribed from public distribution under the 1907 Keihou (the predecessor of the modern Article 175), continued to circulate through antique and used-book markets during the Taisho period. Literary collectors including Nagai Kafu and Saito Mokichi maintained personal shunga collections, indicating the structural pattern of formal prohibition with private continuation.

Erotic photography and postcards

The Taisho period saw substantial expansion of erotic photography and postcard circulation, partly imported (mainly from France and Germany) and partly domestically produced. The material was distributed through the same backroom-of-the-bookshop (“okuuri”) channels that handled the shunga-era underground.

Literature and art

Tanizaki Jun’ichiro

Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886–1965) was the major Taisho-and-early-Showa-period novelist of the fetish and aesthetic register. Shisei (The Tattooer, 1910), Chijin no Ai (A Fool’s Love / Naomi, 1924–1925), and Manji (Quicksand, 1928–1930) are the canonical works. Chijin no Ai, in particular, develops the moga-style heroine Naomi as the focus of the protagonist’s obsessional fascination; the novel is one of the most-cited Taisho-Roman works for its dramatisation of the period’s complex of modernity, female image, and male erotic projection.

Takehisa Yumeji

The painter and poet Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) developed the Yumeji-style beauty (yumeji-shiki bijin), a melancholy, soft-eyed female image that became the visual icon of Taisho Roman. Yumeji’s work circulated through book design, postcards, chiyogami paper, and posters; the aesthetic became the defining visual register of the period and continues to be the principal visual image associated with Taisho-Roman in postwar cultural memory.

Kishida Ryusei

The Western-style painter Kishida Ryusei (1891–1929) produced substantial nude and figure work in the Taisho period. Meiji-period nude painting had been politically controversial (Kuroda Seiki’s 1895 Nude Lady generated a major censorship debate), but Taisho-period sensibilities allowed more open nude depiction in fine art.

Cultural-historical significance

The Taisho period occupies a particular position in the history of modern Japanese sexuality. Bounded by the harder regulatory frame of the Meiji period before it and the wartime militarist regimentation of the early Showa period after, the fifteen years of Taisho produced an unusual concentration of developments that have continued to shape Japanese sexual culture: the public legitimation of romantic love as a basis for relationship; the rise of new women’s images organised around modernity and autonomy; the entry of birth control into public discourse; the formation of new types of urban entertainment service organised around pseudo-romantic engagement.

The Showa-era statist-and-pronatalist turn beginning around 1931 (with the Manchurian Incident) closed down most of these developments at the level of public discourse. Free-love advocacy, birth-control activism, the moga image, and substantial portions of ero-guro-nansensu publishing were all suppressed or driven underground. The Taisho-period developments resumed in modified form in the postwar period, with substantial continuity into the postwar kasutori culture and the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

See also

• Yuujo
• Oiran
• Shunga
• Yoshiwara
• Kasutori-era publications
• Free expression
• Modern girl / Moga
• Yosano Akiko
• Margaret Sanger in Japan