Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyze the changing presentation of Marie Curie to the Japanese public through articles published in various magazines from 1910s to 1930s. In particular, it will deal with the intersection of the two images of Curie as a scientist and as a woman.

Paper long abstract:

Long before the translation of her biography was published in the late 1930s, the Japanese public was well acquainted with the name of Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867-1934). References to her work and achievements appeared no less than twenty times between 1910 and 1912 in "Mukudori tsūshin" (The Starling's Reports), the column about world's news that Mori Ōgai wrote in the literary magazine "Subaru". As the discoverer of radium, she was featured in several articles, starting in 1912 with the ones by physic Nagaoka Hantarō (1865-1950), who had met her in person in Paris. Moreover, from the 1920s, in addition to scientific magazines, portrayals of 'Madame Curie' (Kyurī fujin) began to appear in women's magazines as "Fujin no tomo", emphasizing her significance not only as a scientist but as a woman one. Her death in 1934 and the biography written by her daughter Ève in 1937 whipped up further interest in her life and work in the late 1930s, which took shape in a number of articles and even in a drama by playwright and stage director Kitamura Kihachi (1898-1960) in 1940.

This paper will analyze the changing presentation of Marie Curie to the Japanese public through articles published in various magazines from 1910s to 1930s. In particular, it will deal with the intersection of the two images of Curie as a scientist and as a woman, which took shape in different combinations depending on time and target audience, to show to what extent her gender was perceived as an asset or as an obstacle to her successfulness as a scientist. Winner of two Nobel prizes and internationally renowned as a scientist of distinction, Marie Curie embodied an intersection of gender and science that was unique for Japan, where women were not admitted at universities before 1912 and where the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in science, Yasui Kono (1880-1971), earned it not before 1927.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyse Unnō Jūza's (1897-1949) attempt to organize a "popular scientific literary movement" in the scientific magazine Musen Denwa, focusing on the symbiotic relationship between science and literature that shaped the scientific popular discourse of the dawn of the Shōwa era.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on the encounter between science and literature that shaped the phenomenon of "popularizing science", by which I mean the use of both fiction and scientific knowledge within texts published in popular magazines. I argue that this phenomenon finds its beginnings in the Meiji period and it is reflected in several magazines (not only scientific in their content). The same phenomenon continues during the Taishō and Shōwa periods in magazines such as Musen Denwa, where Unno Jūza (1897-1949), himself writer and scientist today considered as the "father of Japanese SF", attempted to organize what he called a "popular scientific literary movement" (taishū kagaku bungei undō). This project found space in the column Taishū Kagaku Bungei and had a short life: it lasted only four numbers (April - June 1927). However, this episode, which marks Unnō's literary debut, gives us a paradigmatic example of the way according which science and literature were used at the dawn of Shōwa era. Declaring that the "Japanese have the mission to convert Japan into a scientific country", the magazine is a heterogeneous patchwork of fictional pieces and popular science texts (in the form of article, and even manga). It is a textual space whose construction is predicated on the participation of the readership.

In his seminal work Kindai dokusha no seiritsu (The Rise of the Modern Reader), Maeda Ai claims that in order to grasp the target audience we need to take into account three factors: author's awareness of the reader, reader's reception, and the structure of the publishing system. By analysing the magazine and its texts following these three directions, I intend to show how crucial the symbiotic relationship between science and literature was in shaping the popular imagination, and how the phenomenon of "popularizing science" is closely related to magazines of the preceding decades.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the use and advertisement of hormonal products in 1930ties and 1940ties Japan. It will show how the popular discourse on so-called sex-hormones influenced the understanding and definition of sexed bodies and aided pronatalist and eugenic policies of imperial Japan.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is exploring the discussion, use and advertisement of hormone products in 1930ties and 1940ties Japan. During the first half of the twentieth century, research on hormones flourished in Japan and Japanese pharmaceutical as well as cosmetics' companies such as Takeda pharmaceuticals, Shiseido, Kurabu Cosmetics and Teikoku Hormone offered a wide range of products including Hormones.

Advertisements for such products were disseminated in popular magazines and articles and interviews with medical personal let to the spread of information about hormonal functions. In the discussions in popular media, the discovery of hormonal treatments was connected to techno-scientific expectations for human improvement as well as to discourses on gender. Experts recommended the use of hormone injections as a means of rejuvenation and speculated about yet to be discovered benefits of hormone treatments. The interest in so- called sex-hormones was especially high and the question, in how far these hormones were responsible for sexual appetite and fertility, for men's sexual potency and women's reproductive capacity, remained at the heart of many arguments about hormones. Even during the wartime, production of hormone products, including those targeting men or women and their supposedly specific needs, increased. Furthermore, the use of such products was encouraged from official sites and hormone advertisements were disseminated in state-sponsored propaganda magazines. But the presence of hormone advertisements in Japanese wartime propaganda is not only a subtle reference to and acknowledgement of sexuality and sexual activity - the propagation of the use of gender-specific hormones can be understood as an echo and integral part of Japans pronatalist and racial hygienist population policy. This paper explores the use and advertisement of hormonal products as both a cultural practice which influenced the understanding and definition of sexed bodies and as the expression of pronatalist and eugenic policies in imperial Japan.

Paper short abstract:

My paper examines Takahama Kyoshi's (1874-1959) notion of urban modernity in the essay "Marunouchi" (1927) while situating it in the broader context of the teito fukkō (Imperial Capital reconstruction) rhetoric and emphasising his assessment of architectural designs and technological development.

Paper long abstract:

Within the framework of the urban renewal discourse characterising the Great Kantō Earthquake's aftermath (Yoshimi 2002; Sorensen 2002), journals and magazines played a major role in disseminating contrasting ideas about urban modernisation, the ongoing efforts at promoting functionalisation, and technological advancement. In 1927, «Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun» published a series titled "Dai Tōkyō hanjōki" whose overall aim was to track the reconstruction process by asking renowned authors of the time to write non-fiction pieces about one area of the city that they considered particularly significant. Though the prevailing tone of the collection of essays is elegiac (Goddard 2017), some of the writers displayed a positive attitude towards the future of Tōkyō. I will focus on Takahama Kyoshi's (1874-1959) contribution, "Marunouchi", where the business district is the focal point of a meditation about destruction, city planning and what we may define as the "iconology" of a modern capital.

Takahama was a regular contributor of the literary magazine «Hototogisu», whose offices had been set up in the Marunouchi building, or Marubiru, soon after its completion, in the early months of 1923. While drawing on his personal recollections of Marunouchi, Takahama also adopts the point of view of the newcomer, and this hybridisation of the narrative voice enables him to look at the quarter from a distance, objectively. Further, the essay is structured according to a threefold timeline: past, present, and future Tōkyō are coalesced in a composite image reflecting anxieties, expectations, and sense of loss embedded in the reconstruction process.

Takahama focuses on essential elements of the modern city such as tall buildings and transportation networks; he seeks the distinctive quality of an Imperial Capital-the so-called "teito-rashisa"-within the fabric of post-quake Tōkyō and finds it in the business district, whose trademark building should be, he suggests, the very "access point" to the city. My paper will examine Takahama's notion of urban modernity while situating this essay in the broader context of the "teito fukkō" (Imperial Capital reconstruction) rhetoric and emphasising his assessment of architectural designs and technological development.