Tag - moga

 
 

MOGA

Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / Longform
Dec 6, 2021
‘Modern girls’: Japan's first recognizable youth culture movement
Young women in the late 1920s and '30s exuded a sense of affluence and independence that is still apparent today.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jun 14, 2014
Ghostly footprints of the 'modern girl' along Kamakura's coastline
There's a scene in Junichiro Tanizaki's serialized novel "Naomi" (originally titled "A Fool's Love") from 1924 where the besotted protagonist, Joji, watches his wife, Naomi — part Lolita, part Madame Bovary, all trouble — through the pine trees. Having just emerged from a seaside villa, she is sashaying across the sand in nothing more than a cloak and high heels; the pied piper to no less than four men. The beach is Kamakura's Yuigahama, which was a draw for moga — the new so-called modern girls who emerged after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake shook up the city and its culture. (The term "Naomi-ism" was also used at the time to describe the new phenomenon of modern girls, but I guess that one didn't stick.)
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Dec 14, 2013
Naomi
The best hint of what "Naomi" by Junichiro Tanizaki is about is its Japanese title "Chijin no Ai," ("A Fool's Love"). Written between 1924 and 1925, Tanizaki's classic tale of Japan's roaring '20s is a warning to any man who falls for a much younger woman and is fool enough to think he can control her. It's "Lolita" meets "Pygmalion," though Naomi is no "fair lady," despite the efforts of the book's narrator, Joji (professor Higgins to Naomi's Eliza).

Longform

Later this month, author Shogo Imamura will open Honmaru, a bookstore that allows other businesses to rent its shelves. It's part of a wave of ideas Japanese booksellers are trying to compete with online spaces.
The story isn't over for Japan's bookstores