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Paper short abstract

This paper defines the Japanese modern girl (moga) as a cinematic regime of visibility, not a stable social type. Comparing Naruse Mikio’s Street Without End (1934) and Ozu Yasujirō’s Woman of Tokyo (1933), it shows how urban spectatorship shapes moga-ness via spectacle and moral surveillance.

Paper long abstract

This paper defines the Japanese “modern girl” (moga) not as a stable social type but as a cinematic regime of visibility: an aesthetic arrangement through which women’s labor, urban consumer space, leisure, and sexual legibility are made visible, circulated, and regulated within modern mass culture. Rather than equating the modern girl with surface markers such as Western dress or employment, the paper examines the conditions under which women’s bodies become visually and morally legible in the modern city, and the points at which that legibility becomes unstable.

To specify these conditions, the paper compares two early-1930s Japanese silent films: Naruse Mikio’s Street Without End (Kagirinaki hodo, 1934) and Ozu Yasujirō’s Woman of Tokyo (Tokyo no onna, 1933). Both films center on working women, yet they construct modern femininity through markedly different directorial strategies. Naruse foregrounds the production of visibility at the level of the scene, treating urban space as a field of intersecting sightlines and evaluative gazes. Ozu, by contrast, foregrounds the management of visibility at the level of narration, organizing concealment and disclosure so as to position the spectator within an ethical framework of judgment.

In Street Without End, the Ginza café functions as an apparatus of metropolitan consumption that converts female labor into spectacle. Through blocking, movement, and spatial design, Naruse choreographs competing gazes—customers, managers, and passersby—so that the heroine’s work becomes assessable and exchangeable within the urban scene. By contrast, Woman of Tokyo structures visibility through a division between day and night. The heroine’s daytime office work produces an image of respectable modern femininity that depends on the concealment of nocturnal labor at a dance hall. When concealment fails, visibility is transformed into moral surveillance, routing the spectator toward judgment through the family’s economy of honor and shame.

By bringing these films into dialogue, the paper demonstrates how Japanese silent cinema organized modern femininity through space, narrative timing, and spectatorship. It argues that the modern girl was not a coherent symbol of progress but a fragile configuration produced through negotiations between spectacle, morality, and control.