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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Outsides

The journal took readers outside the store to metropolitan and regional sights.

Readers were also taken on longer journeys, such as to the hot springs of Beppu and out to Okinawa.

There were also features on travel to Asian continent, such as to China and “Indochina.”

All three carousels show pictures that romanticize the landscape. Is Mitsukoshi's romanticization of home different from abroad? Are there other categories more useful for comparison and contrast? Should we think of these as representing nestled spheres of mobility or as sharply divided spaces? How did such fantasy journeys play a part in Mitsukoshi's imagined geography of “East” and “West”?

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Mitsukoshi: Opening Up
More than a store catalog, the journal Mitsukoshi provided culture, entertainment, and news. The carousel above shows some examples of content, with annotations. Other regular features, such as travel essays or “household visits,” are discussed elsewhere in the module. Many of the carousel's images suggest that, even at the brink of war with the Allies, the department store continued to look Westward with its ads featuring glamorous Caucasian models, recipes for Western cooking, and meditations on Beethoven or science.
Journaling Home
The journal had always showcased sites, events, and figures in the metropolis, in the region, and in the nation.
However, during the total war years, consumerist Mitsukoshi actively sought out new kinds of locations, such as fields, factories, and workshops to align itself with wartime productivism. Explicit expressions of support for the wartime regime could be found in such features as a miniseries on “Fighting Osaka” and repeated mention of the New Order and Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Continuity with prewar practice can be seen in the journal's sustained interest in craftsmen workshops and factories for luxury items, but during the war the featured craftsmen were almost always men engaged in manual labor, thus in line with an emphasis on masculinity in wartime productivism. Did the craftsmen workshops speak more of the Japanese past or its present?
Simultaneously, the journal continued to provide whimsical, artistic, philosophic, and even pacific spaces. Throughout the war, artists and collectors were shown in their studios or outside, performing a masculinity at odds with military culture. Moreover, up through the final issue, Mitsukoshi's cultural sphere continued to celebrate European artists and artistic traditions.
Did these two modes of ideological region-making clash, collaborate, or simply co-exist separately? Was “home” a warfront or refuge?