Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the role of "race" in the construction of beauty ideals in cosmetic advertisements. The material analyzed will span from the 1960s, when modeling became a popular occupation for "mixed-race" people, to the moment when this trend started to fade in the 1980s.

Paper long abstract:

The objective of this paper is to investigate the representation of the "foreign looking" body in beauty advertisement material ranging from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. Starting point for my investigation will be an analysis of Shiseidō advertisements. The make-up company was one of the most influential players in shaping discourses about beauty, and its 1966 summer campaign is widely known for having kickstarted the popularity of "mixed race" models (Aoki, 2016).

In the mid-sixties "mixed race" people born during the American occupation started being well represented in the modeling industry. This trend peaked in the early 1970s: in the following period, we see the re-emergence of the theme of "tradition", followed in the 1980s by advertisement that appeals to an increased diversification of consumer identities (Yamamura, 2016).

The impact of media on the perception of "mixed race" has been recognized by previous studies, most notably Shimoji (2018) and Iwabuchi (2014). "Konketsuji", as they were referred to at the time, had been at the center of a moral panic and victims of discrimination in the immediate post-war. However, in the subsequent ten to twenty years, the media created a "positive" image that often did not reflect the life conditions in which "mixed" individuals outside the TV screen found themselves in (Shimoji, 2018).

Glamourizing representations of "foreign looking" bodies have been mostly neglected by research so far, since the focus has been on relativizing the supposedly positive media images that are widespread in the present day by unearthing a history of pathologization (Ifekwunigwe 2004). The present paper aims to fill this gap by using multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) to understand historical visual advertisement. The underlying assumption is that historical glamourizing discourses are in need to be analyzed, as it is likely that they had an impact on the way "foreign-looking" bodies are represented in the present day. By comparing how different looking bodies were represented and strategically used in different decades, we might have a better understanding of how ideas about "beauty" and "race" intersected in post-war Japan, creating discourses that have survived to the present day.