The Modern Boy as the New Body of Modernity? Contesting the Meaning of Masculinity in Early 20th-century Japan

This article examines textual and visual representations of the modern boy during the height of his circulation in the Japanese media during the 1920s and 1930s. Depending on the ideological agendas of the various cultural producers constructing the modern boy in discourse, the body of the modern boy signified different things. On the one hand, he was endorsed as a novel and utopic form of embodied modernity, a prototype of the modern Japanese man who personified the spirit and energy of the times. On the other hand, he was also portrayed as a display of inauthentic, failed masculinity with the didactic purpose of demonstrating what a modern Japanese man was not. By analysing competing views of the modern boy in conversation with questions of gender, modernity and power, this article argues that the modern boy constitutes a complex and contradictory narrative of Japanese masculinity shaped by competing ideological agendas of the period. The ambivalence of the modern boy discourse points to the way modern masculinity was a highly contested and politicised concept during the 1920s and 1930s, as individuals, social institutions and the state vied to control the contours of the ideal male body in early 20(th)-century Japan.