The Japanese government launched the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement in September 1937. It had to labour hard to generate spiritual support for the war because during the preceding two decades social and political problems associated with industrialization and modernization had seized national attention in the burgeoning mass media. An influx of new Western ideas and ideologies offered solutions to these problems, and some demanded radical changes to Japanese society and politics. The political parties in the Diet ended oligarchic control of the cabinets, representing one aspect of what has been known as the era of ‘Taishô democracy’.Footnote ³ Consequently, although not disrupted by war or other major international crises, the 1920s has nevertheless become known as a tumultuous decade disturbed by industrial and rural disputes as well as campaigns for universal male suffrage, women's liberation and Burakumin (former outcasts) equality. Mass violence against Koreans and left-wing political activists and labour organizers following the devastating Kantô earthquake in 1923 has added to the picture of domestic unrest. In addition, the end of the decade saw not only a series of strikes, labour conflict, and tenant farmer disputes as the economy collapsed into depression, but also mass arrests of Communist Party members and sympathizers.

At the same time, however, the decade saw the beginnings of consumerism and growth of urban entertainments strongly influenced by Western, and increasingly after the 1923 Kantô earthquake, American popular culture. This was the era of modernism (modanizumu) and the modern life (modan raifu or modan seikatsu), when the modern girl (modan gâru or moga) and modern boy (modan boi or mobo) strode the streets of the Ginza and threatened officially sanctioned gender roles.Footnote ⁴ Department stores, cafés, dance halls and Hollywood movies attracted the younger generation and new urban white collar class away from the traditional teahouses and geisha.Footnote ⁵ And away from political activism. ‘Speed’, ‘jazz’ and [romantic] ‘love’ (ren'ai) became the catchwords of the day as well as ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’.Footnote ⁶

As a result, long before total war or even the imminent possibility of war, government officials had already begun to worry about the moral state of the people. Furthermore, it was changes in social mores and behaviour as much as ‘dangerous’ political ideas that caused the concern. Moral reform measures were initiated during the late 1920s, and during the 1930s they were stepped up to become nationwide campaigns. The contemporary Marxian psychologist Tosaka Jun perceived these measures to have an ideological intent of ‘thought control’. In his view, thought was something that appeared as public morals, and public morals symbolized thought. Consequently, any attempt to control public morals was actually an attempt to control thought.Footnote ⁷ In the interwar Japanese context ‘thought’ (shisô) usually referred to political ideas and ideologies, and ‘dangerous thought’ (kiken shisô) to radical socialism and communism.

However, examining government officials' attitudes towards modern entertainments, in particular cafés and dance halls,Footnote ⁸ suggests that the efforts to rectify public morals were not simply rhetorical code for protecting the political or economic status quo. Individualism, materialism and feminism were regarded as threats to the Japanese nation as much as radical socialism and communism. References to ‘purity’ and prevention of ‘decadence’ and degeneracy indicate the need felt by authorities for a moral cleansing of the nation.

Moreover, government officials were not the only ones who perceived a decline in public morals. A wide range of social commentators and reformers representing ideologies and agendas from the conservative right to the radical left responded critically to the new mass entertainment industry. In particular, the middle class Protestant moral reform organization, the Purity Society (Kakuseikai), was prominent in lobbying for restrictions on cafés as well as abolition of the licensed prostitution system. Consequently, private and public groups and individuals often worked together to cleanse the nation of moral degeneracy, to reinvigorate the family, and to reinstil values of hard work, thrift and cooperation.Footnote ⁹

These findings add another dimension to the work of scholars examining the intellectual and social history of interwar Japan, especially those who have been concerned with Japanese responses to modernity as it began to flourish at this time. Tetsuo Najita and Harry D. Harootunian have depicted the Second World War as opposition to the cultural as well as political hegemony of the West, and Harootunian has seen intellectuals during the 1930s and early 1940s as being ‘overcome by modernity’.Footnote ¹⁰ Like the public officials whom Sheldon Garon has investigated who tried to ‘mould’ Japanese minds, the government officials and moral and social reformers examined here were taking measures in order not to be ‘overcome’ by modernity.Footnote ¹¹ This study reinforces the findings in Garon's work on ‘social management’ in revealing the cooperative role with the state that middle class nongovernmental reformers played in attempting to achieve their modernizing goals,Footnote ¹² or in this case, to control what they perceived as undesirable aspects of modernization. Garon has focused on government campaigns of ‘moral suasion’, to use his preferred term, which endeavoured to instil a culture of thrift and savings among Japanese people, especially Japanese women.Footnote ¹³ In another study of deflation policies during the Great Depression, Mark Metzler has demonstrated the moral as well as gendered aspects of government policies aimed at reducing consumption.Footnote ¹⁴ The urban entertainments focused upon here were part of the modern consumerism that urban Japanese dwellers were pursuing even during the height of the depression.

Entertainment and Morality

It was during the early 1920s that education and social affairs officials became seriously concerned about the national social significance of modern entertainments and the way city dwellers were spending their leisure time. Studies of mass entertainment conducted by metropolitan and central government institutions are evidence of this new concern about its effects on morality. The Osaka City government, for example, commissioned Ôbayashi Munetsugu of the Ôhara Research Institute for Social Problems to study performance entertainments in 1920. Another report on leisure commissioned by the Osaka City government linked the way people used their leisure time with the development of culture and productivity in their working lives. It pointed out that 80 per cent of crimes in the United States were committed during leisure time. Consequently, the authors concluded, social policies that would insure the effective and healthy use of leisure were as important as social policies that would enable a fair distribution of wealth.Footnote ¹⁵

In 1921 the Social Education Section of the Ministry of Education employed the social researcher and commentator Gonda Yasunosuke to carry out a national survey of popular entertainment. Gonda would go on during the 1920s and 1930s to publish a number of books and articles on urban popular entertainment and to participate in a second national survey in 1929. Following a second national survey, Gonda wrote a major book on trends in urban popular entertainment that made him the leading researcher in the field.Footnote ¹⁶ His views will be discussed later on in this essay.

Still further evidence of government concern over the moral effects of modern entertainments was the 1924 publication of Nakata Toshizô's Goraku no kenkyû (A Study of Leisure). Nakata's study resulted directly from the Ministry of Education's desire to ‘improve’ entertainment in order to ‘lead the people onto the right path’.Footnote ¹⁷ In a foreword, Nakata's superior in the Ministry, Norisugi Kaju, explained that ‘recent advancement in educational thought meant that there is an increased interest in leisure life and in artistic education. At the same time, entertainment is now being studied as the most significant issue in public edification’.Footnote ¹⁸ Nakata himself prefaced his book by pointing out that

The significance of social issues and their link with morality in the eyes of government officials was made explicit by Tachibana Takahiro, subsection head of the Censorship Section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board (Keishichô) for over ten years, and a consultant to the Ministry of Education. But it is important to note that in writing about modern entertainment in 1928, Tachibana distinguished entertainment issues from concern about the influence of leftist political ideologies and emphasized their moral implications. As he explained,

Tachibana went on to argue that entertainment could be an effective means of edification (kyôka).

Tachibana's assumption of the necessity to provide moral guidance for the Japanese people was representative of governmental elites at this time. During the 1920s officials in a wide range of social fields sought to develop a more proactive, interventionist role for government in order to prevent, rather than just repress social problems. For example, Ôbayashi, in his study of mass entertainment, referred to the observation by some educators and religious leaders that theatres and films tended to encourage debauchery, and this was one reason that they needed to be controlled through censorship. But besides supporting repressive restrictions, he also concluded that authorities should find other ways to ‘guide’ the film and theatre industries to produce plays and movies that had edificatory and moralistic elements.Footnote ²¹ Censorship of films had begun in 1911 in Osaka, but after scene cuts increased in 1920, new, stricter regulations were introduced in 1921 for all types of performance entertainments. Although police censors were concerned to prevent encouragement of crimes, kissing scenes (13.7 per cent) made up the largest percentage of cut scenes.Footnote ²² At the same time the Home Ministry moved toward unifying film censorship.Footnote ²³

As for positive incentive measures, Tachibana also supported suggestions that entertainment be promoted as a national public project. He particularly favoured Murata Toyoaki's proposal for building a national theatre because Tachibana believed that drama, even more than novels and films, was very powerful in its effects on the intellect, emotion, imagination and the senses of the audience.Footnote ²⁴ Tachibana argued that presentation of good dramas and movies that would serve such edification purposes could not be trusted to private theatre operators, because they were driven by profit-making aims and would simply pander to popular tastes, which he considered changeable and ‘not cultivated enough to understand good shows’.Footnote ²⁵ Here is evidence of the continuation of a condescending paternalistic attitude toward the lower classes among government and private elites that had characterized Meiji ‘civilization and enlightenment’ policies. Tachibana also promoted the idea of the Ministry of Education producing a textbook about a recommended play that would include detailed instructions on various aspects of its performance. In his view, exposure to good drama would not only entertain, but also ‘comfort, encourage, teach, lead the audience and make them reflect, repent, and develop their minds’.Footnote ²⁶

Influential social researchers and commentators such as Gonda Yasunosuke both shared and shaped such views among government officials. Although he observed that modern entertainments were usually associated with the new middle class, Gonda pointed to the emergence of a new proletarian working class in the city as the source of a change in the meaning of entertainment and in the creation of new modern urban forms.Footnote ²⁷ In contrast to traditional rural entertainment which involved participation by villagers, such as sumo and bon dancing, modern urban entertainment focused on watching performances, including film, drama and storytelling (yose).Footnote ²⁸

Because the providers of modern urban entertainment were profit-oriented businesses, Gonda argued that the government needed to take social measures ‘to prevent the evils of profit-oriented entertainment’.Footnote ²⁹ These included both negative repressive measures for undesirable types of entertainment, and positive, supportive measures for what were considered socially beneficial entertainments. Among the latter, Gonda suggested public funding for educational films or plays in commercial theatres. Like Tachibana, Gonda promoted the building of publicly funded entertainment theatres to provide ‘healthy (kenzen)’ entertainment for city dwellers and examples of good entertainment to commercial operators. Gonda also argued for ‘purification (junka)’ of the profit-oriented mentality of theatre operators by educating them about their social role.Footnote ³⁰

Gonda's use of the terms ‘healthy’ and ‘purification’ points to a common feeling that the new urban entertainments, like a disease, were weakening the moral or spiritual body of the Japanese nation. Nakata Toshizô also used such words, emphasizing the significance of entertainment as a source of both physical and spiritual vitality.Footnote ³¹ He noted that this had been revealed in the immediate aftermath of the September 1923 Kantô earthquake when tens of thousands of people flocked to outdoor theatres in Hibiya Park in October and November.Footnote ³² His views did not change in the following years, and in fact, two years of studying film education in the United States and Europe at the beginning of the 1930s reinforced his belief in the importance of leisure and entertainment for energizing people. As he concluded,

Nakata believed that the government's neglect of leisure and entertainment had resulted in the prevalence of ‘unhealthy (fukenzen)’ and ‘vulgar (hizoku)’ entertainment.Footnote ³⁴ He blamed the lack of ‘clean and fair (seishin na kômei seidai na)’ entertainment facilities in Japan for the ‘morally questionable (fûkijô ikagawashii),’ ‘debauched (yûtô kibun)’ character of cafés as well as for the appeal of radical ideas, both rightist and leftist. He argued that ‘it is of great importance for the nation to purify (junka suru) the energy of young people and put it to good use’ [my emphasis].Footnote ³⁵

Writing in 1932 on municipal problems, the journalist Fujita Shin'ichirô also advocated the necessity of establishing a ‘healthy’ entertainment policy because it was now obvious that leisure life had become as significant as working life for the character and morality of the nation. In his view, the entertainment industry played on the bad side of human nature, turning entertainment into a commercialised fashion or fad. City dwellers had become ‘addicted’ to excitement and pleasure, an addiction that to Fujita was comparable to addiction to drugs or alcohol.Footnote ³⁶

This conflation of the physical/scientific and the moral/spiritual and the use of vocabulary with both moral and hygienic overtones were not unique to Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. There are examples of this discourse in Europe and the United States, where it was not uncommon for critics of both the ideological left and right to regard modern mass culture and consumption as immoral and threatening to the body politic. When consumerism emerged in the West during the eighteenth century, the desire to acquire fashionable clothes was described as an ‘epidemical madness’, a ‘universal contagion’ and ‘infectious’ like a disease.Footnote ³⁷ In the United States of America, social reformer Ellen Richards in the first decade of the twentieth century worried that giving up self-control in leisure and consumption was responsible for the lower birth rate among middle class women, which was leading to ‘race suicide’.Footnote ³⁸ In Germany too participants in debates over abortion blamed social decay for the declining birth rate, which, in turn, they depicted as threatening the ‘national body’. German social critics during the interwar years were also suspicious of popular culture. Many worried about the moral effects of movies, especially ‘Americanization’, and in 1926 the government passed a law to protect young people from ‘filth and dirt’.Footnote ³⁹

Modern Life and Perverse Tastes

As indicated above, what Gonda, Nakata and many other social commentators, reformers and government officials disapproved of were developments in urban entertainments associated with what was dubbed ‘modern life’. Rather than in the home, Gonda located ‘modern life’ in the streets (gaitô) and in their extensions, notably cafés, bars, dance halls, Western restaurants, movie theatres and soda fountains of big cities.Footnote ⁴⁰ Beginning in the late 1920s, cafés and dance halls came under increasing criticism and government restrictions as moral reform campaigns swung into action.

Cafés, in particular, had flourished after the Kantô earthquake. They provided erotic service as well as jazz, Western cocktails such as Manhattens and martinis, Western food, decor and ambience. The largest and most high-class establishments in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo were neon-lit multi-story buildings with more than 100 waitresses employed to entertain customers. In 1929 there were 50 on the main street of Ginza alone, dozens on back streets and thousands in other entertainment districts throughout the city, such as Shinjuku. A police survey reported 15,559 waitresses working in 6,187 cafés and 1,345 bars in Tokyo.Footnote ⁴¹ The number of cafés and waitresses continued to proliferate throughout the country even during the depression years of the early 1930s.

At least one commentator, the novelist and social critic Murobuse Kôshin (Takanobu), regarded the café as the symbol of the modern, extolling its liberating effect on women and its provision of an atmosphere of romantic love (ren'ai) for young people.Footnote ⁴² Murobuse and others noted that the café was one of the few places where young men and women in the cities could meet and mingle socially.Footnote ⁴³ Young, salaried white collar workers or ‘salarymen’ comprised the majority of patrons in the post-earthquake cafés. Geishas were too expensive for them and too complicated to arrange. Perhaps more important, those traditional entertainers did not satisfy the desires for a modern lifestyle among men of the younger urban generation. As another social critic Murashima Yoriyuki observed, it was a ‘time of speed’ and ‘modern men want a flaming moment of pleasure’. They were drawn to cafés for the ‘love feeling (ren'ai kibun)’ that the café waitress (jokyû) as a ‘modern girl’ could provide.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his words, the café attracted young men because ‘it is not merely gaudy interior decorations, dark lighting or noisy jazz music, but the jokyû girls' alluring voices, erotic coquetry, provocative clothes and the charming atmosphere that arises from them’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Gonda Yasunosuke and others were far less sanguine about the merits of cafés for either the waitresses or their patrons. Rather than modern, liberated women, Gonda considered café waitresses and dance hall girls to be ‘formal’ rather than genuine participants in ‘modern life’, no more than workers in the ‘modern life industry’.Footnote ⁴⁶ According to Gonda, ‘modern life’ was a way of living divorced from any productive work or concerns other than consumption and therefore led to enjoyment of ‘perverse tastes (hentai shikôsei)’ in the streets or their extensions, the cafés.Footnote ⁴⁷ He and others believed that the women had lost rather than gained freedom, and the ‘wretched’ salarymen who patronized them did so because they lived in a time when there was no hope for the future.Footnote ⁴⁸

‘Perverse tastes’ referred to the increasingly eroticized service offered by café waitresses as well as their frequent engagement in prostitution after hours. Café owners, especially those who moved into Tokyo from Osaka in the late 1920s, pressured their waitresses into this type of service. For example, Osaka café owners had their waitresses stop wearing aprons so that they would be seen more as women rather than as workers. They encouraged them to chat and flirt with patrons and to behave like a girlfriend. Owners also altered seating arrangements, using booths or partitions, to create a more intimate atmosphere.Footnote ⁴⁹ In an Asahi shinbun writer's description, ‘. . .The waitresses. . .hold themselves ready to sit down at the tables or on laps and eat and drink and laugh and talk inanely about anything from ages to literature and social theory with all customers’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Art historian Andô Kôsei's guide to Ginza described the waitresses in the Osaka-owned cafés as ‘skilled workers in an ero factory’.Footnote ⁵¹ Moreover, waitresses' reliance on tips for their income provided an incentive to flatter their patrons.Footnote ⁵² Waitresses received no wages and in fact had to pay for all expenses incurred by their patrons as well as for their own meals and the wages of the cooks. They also had to pay penalty fines for lateness and absences.

As the depression intensified competition among cafés, however, many owners pushed their waitresses into more crass sexual attractions such as the ‘organ service’ and ‘subway service’. The organ service had a waitress lie across patrons' laps like a keyboard and sing notes when they touched different parts of her body.Footnote ⁵³ The subway service allowed a patron to feel a waitress's body by inserting his hand through slits in her skirt.Footnote ⁵⁴ Given the easy availability of such erotic service, we can see why Gonda Yasunosuke suggested that licensed brothel areas such as the Yoshiwara had lost popularity because perverse tastes could be enjoyed in the streets and their extensions, places like cafés.Footnote ⁵⁵ And for these reasons the café, along with jazz, dance halls, cinema and musical revues, came to be associated with a wave of ‘ero-guro-nansensu’ (erotic, grotesque, nonsense) that swept through literary circles and journalism in 1930.Footnote ⁵⁶

Dance halls, like cafés, enjoyed a heyday in the late 1920s and in the early 1930s became increasingly associated with eroticism. Western social dancing had begun during the 1880s among aristocrats and governmental elites, who built the Western-style Rokumeikan to promote social interaction with Westerners. But after the so-called Rokumeikan era, social dancing had died down until around 1919 when Japanese people who had studied in the United States began to form dance clubs, where couples went to dance. A visit by the Prince of Wales to Japan in 1920 made dancing even more popular. But dance halls where men paid to dance with women also began when Katô Heijirô introduced the ticket system at Koteji dance hall in Osaka. As in American dance halls, patrons bought tickets and gave one to dancers after each dance.Footnote ⁵⁷

When the Kantô earthquake in 1923 destroyed many dance clubs in Tokyo, many dancers moved to the Kansai area, making it the centre of dancing for a few years. Dance halls also flourished because police authorities pronounced dancing in cafés to gramophone music inappropriate for a place where food and drink were served. In 1925 the Union Café in Osaka was the first to renovate half of its upstairs room, bring in a band, and acquire a license as a dance hall. Dancers were required to obtain a license, conditional on passing a health check for infectious diseases and a background check on their morals. Patrons bought tickets, initially for ten sen each, for a dance. Dance halls became so popular that many people went just to watch the dances even after the dance halls began to charge an entry fee of 50 sen, which later rose to one yen.Footnote ⁵⁸

Meanwhile, dance clubs re-emerged quickly in Tokyo, and the first dance hall opened in 1927 with a band from Shanghai and many dancers from Osaka. Its manager was a navy commander who had studied tango in Paris. Dance halls became very popular in Tokyo during the second half of the 1920s. On 21 March 1929 the Tôkyô asahi shinbun reported that there were 23 licensed dance halls, employing over 500 dancers.Footnote ⁵⁹ During the 1930s there were eight major dance halls, each averaging 91 dancers.Footnote ⁶⁰

According to writers in the 1930s, at the beginning dance halls had been just for dancing, but they gradually became more erotic.Footnote ⁶¹ Mori Sôtarô of the Research Institute of Sexual Desire (Seiyoku Kenkyûkai) noted the popularity of dancing, but wrote to inform families that dance halls were ‘no better than brothels’.Footnote ⁶² He blamed American movies for exciting Japanese men's lust so that they went to dance halls to attract women.Footnote ⁶³

Musical revues were another feature of the modern ero entertainments. They were among the chief attractions offered in the Asakusa entertainment district of Tokyo, along with the latest Hollywood movies that depicted romantic love and provided models for modern girls. Although Ginza superseded Asakusa as the place to go for modern entertainments after the earthquake, Asakusa continued to attract people of all classes and from all parts of the city. The future Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari also made Asakusa a popular place for ‘slumming’ when he published his experimental novel Asakusa kurenaidan (Asakusa Crimson Red Gang) as a series in the Asahi shinbun in 1929.

As a result of this serialization in a large circulation newspaper and its being made into a film the following year, ‘Casino Folies’ became a household word. Revues, such as the Casino Folies, resembled the extravagant musical stage productions in contemporary Europe and the United States, full of elaborately costumed, but scantily clad chorus girls and glittering stage props. Popular songs, such as ‘New Tokyo March’, reflected their attraction in the era of ero-guro-nansensu: ‘Yesterday, a sword play. Today, ero revue. Modern Asakusa nonsense. Swinging jazz and those beautiful legs.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Recalling the popularity of revues in 1931, the writer Ichinose Naoyuki observed that the audiences were

A rumour that a revue girl had dropped her drawers on stage, the so-called ‘Drawers Incident’, contributed to the revues' ero attraction.Footnote ⁶⁶ According to Enomoto Ken'ichi (known as Enoken), the main performer at the Casino Folies, it was not her drawers, but the cotton sash used to wrap around the breast (there were no bras then) that got loose and nearly dropped. Rumour also had it that Enoken had instigated the incident himself, which led to his being called ‘Eroken’ and summoned by the police. Other theatres nevertheless considered the increase in audience numbers worth the risk of police intervention since Nihonkan established the Ero Ero Dance Company and Shôchikuza started up Dance Ero.Footnote ⁶⁷

Matchbox designs, graphic art, movies and novels frequently featured café waitresses and other modern girls of the dance halls and cabarets as transgressive figures associated with eroticism and materialism.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even in Shin-hanga prints, conservative graphics that presented romanticized images of beautiful Japanese women (bijin), modern girls were represented smoking a cigarette, drinking Western cocktails, dancing with men, wearing Western dresses and makeup, and coiffed with short bobbed or permanent waved hair. They presented an image of sexual availability, if not promiscuity, with their bold fashions, assertive body language and sensual expressions. Two famous examples are Yamamura Kôka's New Carlton Dancers, Shanghai (1924) and Kobayakawa Kiyoshi's Beauties of the Modern Era: Tipsy (1931).Footnote ⁶⁹ Yamamura's print depicts modern women and men on the dance floor of the New Carlton, one of the most celebrated (or notorious) nightclubs in Shanghai. In the foreground sit two women in brightly coloured Western dresses drinking Western cocktails. In comparison, Kobayakawa's print presents a more closeup portrait of an inebriated modern girl in a brightly coloured polka dot sleeveless dress, complete with Western cosmetics, hairdo and accessories. Her eyes look somewhat bleary but stare directly at the viewer in an alluring manner, a sensual image reinforced by the solid red background, cigarette in her hand and cocktail with a red cherry in front of her.

In literature Tanizaki Jun'ichirô's Naomi in Chijin no ai (A Fool's Love)Footnote ⁷⁰ is an iconic modern girl who displayed both her attraction and repulsion for Japanese men. The narrator Jôji is an engineer employed by a company, a salaryman typical of café patrons, who is attracted to Naomi because of her Western-style name and resemblance to the American actress Mary Pickford. He ‘rescues’ Naomi from life as a café waitress, and they begin to enjoy a modern Western lifestyle. However, Naomi's enthusiasm for Western social dancing soon exceeds Jôji's, who is then left at home. When she takes on various lovers, Jôji throws her out of the house, but he is unable to forget her. Eventually he persuades her to come back to him, but only after promising her total independence and a life of Western luxury.

Chijin no ai was serialized in Josei, a magazine inaugurated in 1922 by the Kurabu (Club) cosmetics company to present modern ideas to educated middle class women. A 1983 retrospective on the 1920s in the women's magazine an an referred to Josei as ‘the Bible of the modern girl’.Footnote ⁷¹ With a circulation of approximately 25,000, which in practice included quite a few men as well as women, this introduced new social ideas to a sizable readership. The magazine not only broached previously private subjects of sex, chastity and free love, but made them one of its most frequently discussed topics. The intellectuals, writers and journalists who contributed to these discussions generally did not favour free love in the sense of promiscuity, but they supported the ideas of marriage based on love, of sex for pleasure and not just reproduction, and the insistence on chastity being required of both men and women.Footnote ⁷² This challenged traditional customs of arranged marriage and sexual double standards for men and women and legitimated women's sexual needs and desires. Tanizaki's Naomi may have been a fictional character, but the young women in cafés and dance halls were real. Not only did their jobs give them a degree of financial independence, but their workplaces allowed, and encouraged, them to display and express their sexuality.

Rectification of Morals

These developments in modern urban entertainments during the 1920s and early 1930s gave impetus to moral reform efforts both inside and outside the government. The threats of female independence and open female sexuality as well as commodification of the erotic outside the licensed brothel areas provoked the beginnings of restrictions on dance halls and cafés at the end of the 1920s. Encouraged by moral reform groups, the restrictions increased and spread throughout the country during the 1930s, coming to involve arrests of hundreds and thousands of women and male patrons.

Moral reform associations were not new. Protestant reform organizations, including the Salvation Army, the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Purity Society, had tried to abolish the licensed prostitution system since the last two decades of the Meiji period. During the 1920s and 1930s they continued these efforts and persuaded officials interested in social reform to support their cause, but brothel owners joined together to block abolition.Footnote ⁷³ More successful were combined efforts by government officials and Christian reformers to attack the decadence and dissipation seen to be rife in cafés and dance halls.

Moral reformers, both private and public, were particularly concerned about the corrupting effects of cafés on student patrons and on the young women who worked as waitresses. There were many reports of extortion and fighting in the cafés, and Murashima Yoriyuki blamed cafés for a variety of vices and juvenile crimes. Young people wanting to go to cafés were said to be stealing money from home or their employers, and delinquent youths were threatening café patrons for money as well as preying on innocent waitresses.Footnote ⁷⁴ In addition, critics pointed out problems resulting from strong Western-style alcoholic drinks and underage drinking, and they argued that the ‘frivolous’ atmosphere of a café depraved the young waitresses.Footnote ⁷⁵

Members of the Purity Society emphasized the depraved nature of the waitresses. Since the founding of the society in 1911, they had worked for the abolition of the licensed prostitution system. As declared in the inaugural issue of the Society's journal Kakusei, the system was evil, ‘the biggest cause of moral corruption’, Footnote ⁷⁶ and from a humanitarian critic's point of view, a system that gave official approval to the enslavement of thousands of women.Footnote ⁷⁷ The founders issued a call to join their cause ‘for the sake of the nation and society’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Licensed prostitution, they argued, gave young people the idea that women were a commodity that could be purchased. Society members regarded prostitutes and geishas as immoral, foul and polluted like sewage (gesui), but they nevertheless made some distinction between licensed and unlicensed prostitutes. The latter were considered even worse because, in the view of the Society, unlicensed prostitutes were not slaves like licensed prostitutes, but by their own will became corrupt and sold their chastity.Footnote ⁷⁹

Kakusei contributors did not believe that with abolition of licensed prostitution, prostitution would disappear, because ‘like sewage in the city’ it was a necessary evil. On the contrary, they agreed with opponents of abolition that it might lead to an increase in unlicensed prostitution. However, they argued that forcing the ‘sewage’ ‘underground’ would make it less visible and noticeable, in particular to young people who would then be less likely to be corrupted.Footnote ⁸⁰

The Society set out to educate the public through lectures and their journal, but more important, actively sought government measures to control public morals. Abe Isoo, a leading social democrat who was first Vice-President and later President of the Society, took for granted that the government should have a role as moral regulator of Japanese society. In a 1913 issue of Kakusei he criticized the government for its slackness in control of morals, given the importance of this activity that he equated with controlling the ‘spiritual hygiene’ of the nation. He again used metaphors of ‘sewage’ in reference to prostitutes and geishas and called on the government not to be concerned only with regulating brothels and geishas to prevent physical diseases such as syphilis, but to exert control over public morals in order to eradicate these ‘spiritual pests’.Footnote ⁸¹

During the 1930s the Society added cafés to licensed prostitution and geishas as targets for government regulation and control. In 1936, the year when the number of café waitresses reached its peak, Kagawa Toyohiko, a prominent leader in social work and labour organizing, expressed his fear of the harmful effect that cafés were having. He emphasized the need to stop the spread of ‘erotic thought (ero shisô)’ in this ‘erotic era (ero jidai)’.Footnote ⁸² Issues of Kakusei regularly reported on the restrictions on cafés, but members did not believe that arrests of unlicensed prostitutes were effective and called for arrests of male patrons too.Footnote ⁸³

Purity Society members might not have been satisfied with government efforts to control public morals, but, in fact, measures to restrict dance halls, cafés and ‘ero’ service had tightened and spread throughout the country during the first half of the 1930s. Police authorities blamed the depression and ‘social conditions of the time’ for the dramatic increase in such ‘cheap and hedonistic’ places. They observed that proprietors of bars and cafés catered to patrons' hedonistic mood by renovating their establishments with partitions and neon lighting, while waitresses developed more ‘coquettish’ behaviour.

Police in Tokyo responded to the perceived harm to public morals by making more than 600 arrests in bars and cafés each year between 1926 and 1928.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, they did not regard the existing regulations used to make these arrests as sufficient for eliminating the harmful effects. Consequently, in September 1929 a new order establishing ‘Principles of Controlling Cafés and Bars’ was issued to police station chiefs throughout the capital. In what was to become typical of later restrictions throughout the country, cafés and bars were confined to nonresidential areas. The order prohibited certain facilities and building structures that could ‘easily corrupt public morals’, namely separate rooms or partitions, a bathtub for patrons, extremely dark or unusual lighting, and a stage. It further prohibited cafés from allowing loud musical instruments or various types of theatrical, dance or movie performances, revealing disapproval for modern entertainments like jazz, movies and social dancing. Authorities sought to curb ‘ero’ service by limiting business hours to midnight and requiring café owners to check the backgrounds of prospective employees and to keep their waitresses from hailing in customers, going out with patrons or ‘acting like geishas’. Showing some consideration of complaints about exploitation of waitresses, the order also prohibited owners from collecting penalty fees from their employees.Footnote ⁸⁵

Similar measures were being taken in Osaka where dance halls and cafés in the Dôtonbori entertainment district were enjoying their heyday, marked by the hit song from the musical Dôtonbori March in 1928. As mentioned earlier, police authorities began to require separate licenses for dance halls and cafés in 1925, and dance halls were being criticized for contributing to moral problems. But prefectural government authorities did not do much to restrict dance halls until dance hall owners kept dance halls open the night the Taishô emperor died.Footnote ⁸⁶ Disrespect to the throne then combined with moral issues to begin repression in 1927 with the issuance of new regulations for dance halls on building requirements and prohibitions on noisy music, food and alcoholic drinks. Concerned about harmful effects on young people, they banned students from dance halls and required patrons to write their names in a visitor's book. Police officials sometimes stopped patrons leaving the halls to make sure that their details matched the visitor's book entries, and they were even known to interrupt a dancing couple to check that the dancer was carrying her license. Before the end of 1927 the Governor of Osaka Prefecture banned all dance halls.Footnote ⁸⁷

The disappearance of dance halls in Osaka accounts for the move of many dancers to Tokyo where the first dance hall had just opened, but named the Tokyo Institute of Dancing (Tôkyô Butô Kenkyûjo) to avoid using the term ‘dance hall’. This did not prevent the introduction of regulations the following year, however, leading to the closure of all but four out of 33 dance halls.Footnote ⁸⁸ Still, city dwellers' interest in dancing continued, and four more large dance halls opened and remained popular through the depression and until a final ban on Halloween 1940.

When people began to pay for dancing lessons, the police banned these classes as soon as they discovered them, but after a while permitted small scale academies for social dancing, provided they agreed to the following conditions: fewer than five teachers; no dancers or assistants; no dancing among students; name lists of students available for police inspectors; no live music; no tickets; and tuition only up to 9 PM. Furthermore, male and female students had to be taught separately at different hours, and only students were allowed to enter the classroom.Footnote ⁸⁹ Such academies were popular among the upper classes for dance practice rather than tuition, and despite the regulations, students danced together. The first dance competition was held in 1932, and the number and size of academies increased, spreading Western social dancing beyond the aristocracy to the middle classes.Footnote ⁹⁰ Despite, or perhaps because of its widening popularity, various social commentators as well as government officials expressed their concern about dancing's association with immoral behaviour. Pressure on the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board by both high-ranking government officials and the Dance Academy Union led to a police ordinance in March 1933. This formalized the earlier regulations and forced some large academies to reduce their floor spaces to between 66 and 99 square meters.Footnote ⁹¹

Meanwhile, restrictions on Osaka cafés began around the time of the ban on dance halls in that city. The contemporary commentator, Murashima Yoriyuki, indicates that pressure from various interest groups led through a somewhat complicated process to the restrictions. One group consisted of representatives of women's associations who in June 1927 presented the Governor with a petition, pleading that he not grant any more licenses to cafés or other questionable places with waitresses. In July 1929 the Chamber of Commerce also sought restrictions, including limiting of business hours to control immoral conduct of waitresses and prohibiting the sale of alcohol over 16 proof. Newspapers in Osaka and Tokyo picked up the story, and editorials in the Tôkyô asahi shinbun and Ôsaka mainichi shinbun supported control measures. Some, though not all, café owners tried to prevent imposition of new regulations by offering voluntary self-restriction, while café waitresses took the opportunity to submit their own demands to the Chamber of Commerce. But in October the Osaka Prefectural Police issued new regulations for cafés and bars similar to those in Tokyo, explaining that the building structures together with the manner in which waitresses served patrons were ‘lascivious and immoral, indeed a cause for great alarm’ and that authorities feared ‘the harmful consequences if such practices are left unchecked’.Footnote ⁹²

Murashima noted that a number of cafés had to close down because they could not maintain their businesses with the shorter hours, the ban on collection of fines from waitresses, and new building requirements, but he predicted no end to the moral problems as long as waitresses' income remained dependent on tips.Footnote ⁹³ Murashima was right, for during the next few depression years, the number of cafés and waitresses continued to grow. This was the time when ‘ero’ service became more widespread as competition among cafés intensified. Since they did not pay their waitresses any wages, café owners could ‘hire’ more waitresses to attract customers. In Tokyo this was also the time when Osaka owners moved in, and the large cafés in Ginza prospered.

Disturbed by the seeming ineffectiveness of the 1929 regulations, in 1933 the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board issued another set of regulations for the ‘Special Restaurant Trade’. It defined ‘special restaurants’ as ones with Western-style facilities where women served at the table. The new restrictions on structures and facilities became more precise, for example, permitting only one lounge room per floor, no more than 120 cm high walls or partitions, and only white lights. Waitresses were not allowed to wear ‘singular clothes’ or to commit ‘indecencies’, and in reaction to owners' practice of hiring more waitresses to lure in patrons, only one waitress was permitted for each four square metres of lounge space.Footnote ⁹⁴ There was a long list of 20 items mostly related to prohibited activities, which amounted to an extended version of earlier prohibitions.

In addition, there were separate sections of prohibitions related specifically to the behaviour of female employees and to types of people who could not be employed. The latter included ‘a wife without her husband's consent’.Footnote ⁹⁵ This no doubt reflected concern about marriage and the family being undermined because a relatively large number of married women worked as café waitresses; about 22 per cent were married according to a 1930 survey of 3000 waitresses in Osaka.Footnote ⁹⁶

Finally, the regulations gave the police wide discretionary power by means of catchall phrases, such as ‘inappropriate on the grounds of public peace and morals’. On such grounds, police officials could reject building and renovation applications or order a proprietor to dismiss a waitress. Within the first twelve months under these new regulations, 38 special restaurants had their licenses cancelled, and 375 had their operations suspended.Footnote ⁹⁷

In the following year of 1934, police authorities revised the regulations to restrict the patrons of cafés as well as owners and female employees. Adopting a high moral tone, Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters sent a notice to all district police chiefs with instructions to enforce a ban on students and minors in special restaurants and dance halls. The Metropolitan Police Board had sought the support of school principals, the Ministry of Education, and the Governor of Tokyo before taking these measures. Its letter to these officials explained the reasons for the proposed ban:

The Metropolitan Police Board had publicized the content of the letter through the press and received favourable responses from many different sources.

The revised regulations made proprietors responsible for keeping students and minors out—‘it is not intended to punish students and minors’. Nevertheless, during the next several years numerous students as well as waitresses were arrested. On 15 February 1938, for example, six police groups descended on entertainment districts in Tokyo and made more than 2000 arrests. Two days later they spread their net to include mahjong clubs, cinemas, billiard halls, parks and even department stores, bringing the arrest total to 7,373 (7, 032 males and 341 females). The stated intention was to offer an opportunity ‘for warning and introspection for the students, their educators and guardians’.Footnote ⁹⁹

By 1935 more than a dozen prefectures had introduced similar restrictions on cafés and bans on students. Concern about the ‘morals problem’ and proliferation of new restrictions had become so widespread that the Home Ministry decided to issue a national policy to unify regulation of cafés and bars. The new national policy mirrored the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board's regulations, but also added the intention of limiting the number of waitresses and prohibiting certain makeup and clothing. The ban on students was applied nationwide.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In the meantime, musical revues had not escaped the crackdown on ero entertainments. On 24 November 1930 the Tokyo Metropolitan Police issued new rules for revues, as follows:

1. 1. Drawers no shorter than 2 sun (1 sun = 3.03 cm) under the crotch. They must not be flesh coloured.

2. 2. No more than half of the back bared.

3. 3. No chest or stomach bared under the breasts.

4. 4. Tight clothing that shows curves must be worn with a skirt around the hips.

5. 5. No swaying of hips during dances such as an Indian dance and a Hawaiian dance.

6. 6. No kicking up of legs that may continuously show the crotch.

7. 7. During a dance in kimono, no movement that may show the thighs.

8. 8. Any act or clothing that may provoke carnal desires and any unnecessarily cruel act, even though it may not infringe any of the above articles, when discovered, must be reported to the Security Department and be dealt with.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The Tôkyô asahi shinbun reported that the new regulations attacking ero were creating a huge storm in the Asakusa entertainment industry.Footnote ¹⁰² Police officers had a seat reserved for them in the theatres, from which they could observe the performance and halt it if they deemed necessary. This requirement had existed since the mid Meiji period when police authorities wanted to curb the dissemination of ideas associated with the opposition People's Rights Movement by ‘enlightenment story tellers’ in the yose variety halls attended by urban commoners.Footnote ¹⁰³ But during the early 1930s it was eroticism rather than political liberalism or radicalism that provoked police interventions.