by SABINE FRUHSTUCK
In her seminal essay “The Modern Girl as Militant,” Miriam Silverberg (1991b) described the modern girl as a glittering, decadent, middle-class consumer who, through her clothing, smoking, and drinking, flouted tradition in the urban playgrounds of the late 1920s. Silverberg found the identity of the modern girl to be based on her embracing of this cosmopolitan look. As a marker of capitalist modernity, the modern girl was a consumer culture icon, suffusing once-banal objects with an intense aura and occupying new social thought through the positions she took in advertisements. What she expressed, Silverberg wrote, was sometimes historically repressed or could be appropriated for differing ideological ends.
In a concluding commentary on a 2008 book by the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, Silverberg (2008: 354–355) addressed anew the question of who these women were and modified her original response in light of the findings of scholars around the globe. Her answer was that the Japanese modern girl had been multivalent. On the one hand, she was a phantasm projected onto the social landscape by male critics who were made increasingly anxious by the sociocultural changes taking place all around them. On the other hand, she was also a living and breathing being who wanted to engage in the cultural and social revolution. The labor and mobility of working women in the 1920s and 1930s also helped define Japanese interwar modernity. Hence, in Silverberg’s modified understanding of the modern girl, there are those whose commitment to change was limited to a change of clothing, those who were activists, and those whose everyday actions challenged the sociopolitical order (Silverberg 2008: 356–357).
Like the modern girls of the early twentieth century that Silverberg described, female service members of the Self-Defense Forces (Jieitai, SDF) embody some of the most pertinent sociopolitical issues of current-day Japan regarding gender, labor, and mobility.1 I am not suggesting that modern girls simply exchanged their flapper dresses for military uniforms. Rather, the reason that I believe it is fruitful to adapt the early twentieth-century modern girl icon to the current-day context of female service members is this: many female service members made the decision to take their lives into their own hands in an attempt to liberate themselves from the gender and class restrictions of the predominantly rural communities from which they came. In doing so, they shunned some of the most persistent social conventions of contemporary Japan and overcame their families’ pronounced objections to their professional choice to join, at least temporarily, the SDF.