中·日 도시 여성의 문화소비에 따른 모던걸의 표상 - 上海와 東京을 중심으로 -

Abstract

China and Japan came to be incorporated into global capitalist market economy in the wake of their respective openings to the western world from the nineteenth century up to the twentieth century, under whose circumstance the major metropolitan areas in these two countries – mainly Shanghai and Tokyo – concomitantly played a role as a contact zone as well as an exhibition site for capitalist market economy by means of concentration of capitals. The cities transformed in the process of their modernization into a more and more chaotic space where both the traditional and modern and the poor and wealthy coexist conflictingly simultaneously; there needed to be the beings who are capable of establishing and safeguarding new values and frameworks in the process of gradual erosion of existing traditional values and frameworks in the cities. In both China and Japan emerged modern women in the 1920s and 30s as modern lifestyle, born thanks to the then global diffusion of western lifestyle and consumption culture, affected these two countries, and they tend to be divided generally into two groups: the first group is modern girl as an individual, and the second group wise and faithful housewife as an exemplary woman taking good care of household with responsibility. Although Chinese and Japanese women living in cities in the 1920s and 30s have been keen on chasing the fantasy of the socially-demanded ideal image of woman and on acting as the defender of the state-promoted social values, no one will also deny the fact that women’s cultural consumptions enabled the development of modern cultures and that their materialistic consumptions have contributed enormously to the growth and improvement of urban economy. All in all, besides that it is worth the attention that women in this period have actively engaged in political activities to emancipate themselves from men’s domination/oppression, the fact that women, together with men, existed and functioned as part of urban society is itself worth researching.