著者

溝渕 園子

出版者

熊本大学

雑誌

文学部論叢 (ISSN:03887073)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.103, pp.153-163, 2012-03-10

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During the short span of two wars, the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese (1904-1905), victorious Japan began to perceive itself as an equal member among the ranks of modern Western countries. Having self-confidence brought on by the success of the two wars, the concept of "world map" (Andou, 1998) changed in the minds of the Japanese in terms of cultural and political status. This attitude was reflected in the education of young people. For example, at the beginnings of both of those wars were boys' and girls' magazines. The aime of this paper is to examine how the cultural images of Western countries had been formed in "Syoujo-kai", a Japanese girls' magazine, before and after the Russo-Japanese War. In the publication, there is information about girls' schools and institutions of higher education, cautionary tales by experts, news, reports on various topics, a corner for the readers' contributions, and the introduction of foreign culture. Thus, by extracting the images of Russia from this magazine's materials, we are able to locate cues into the thinking of how Western countries were perceived in modern Japan. In this paper, from the viewpoint of comparisons with a boys' magazine, I analyzed what images of Western countries are depicted in both magazines, and what images are not shown in a girls' magazine compared with a boy's magazine. Through this analysis, I tried to concretely consider the images of Russia structures by the media, i.e., girls' magazine in the Meiji Era. Moreover, by exploring the materials, several issues of gender concerning the culture surrounding modern Japanese magazines will be brought up.