Text and Image in Pre-war Japan: Viewing Takehisa Yumeji through Sata Ineko’s ‘From the Caramel Factory’

Abstract

Illustrated text has a strong presence in Japanese cultural production with a tradition of narrative accompanied by images evident across a wide range of genres at different times in Japan. These genres include the illustrated poetry of the hyakunin isshû, medieval picture cards each with a verse, Chinese influenced sansui-ga – literally ‘mountain-water pictures’ or landscape painting – depicting remote sites with accompanying meditative poetic commentary, and kanazôshi, illustrated Edo era (1603-1868) didactic narratives – ranging from the heroic to the supernatural – which became the first widely distributed literary material in Japan. In this discussion, however, I move away from these integrated examples to, instead, ‘yoke together’ two ‘heterogenous’ examples of twentieth-century Japanese illustration and print, both of which represent the pre-war Japanese working-class girl or young woman. The first is the girl as she appears in selected images of commercial artist/illustrator, poet and designer, Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934), while the second is the fictional account of an adolescent factory-girl featured in a short story entitled ‘Kyarameru kôjo kara’ (From the Caramel Factory, 1928), the debut narrative of proletarian woman writer, Sata Ineko (1904-1998). I bring together these two disparate cultural products confident that to consider the two in conjunction with each other enhances our understanding of both. My analysis will demonstrate how visual and written texts have the capacity to scaffold and corroborate the impact of each other – a process that I will discuss in terms of intertextuality – while broadening the possibilities experienced by readers and viewers alike.