婦人雑誌の小宇宙から  [in Japanese] Historical Research into the Microcosm of Women's Magazines  [in Japanese]

In this paper, I consider previous historical researches that I have conducted. For a graduation thesis and a master's thesis, I analyzed women's magazines prior to the Second World War in order to examine norms of gender roles. As a result of the content analysis, I found that ideal images of women described in the magazines changed considerably from the Taisho era to the early Showa era. In analyzing the articles, I developed an interest in various aspects of women's magazines, such as serial novels, advertisements, comics, photogravures, and reader's columns. Several studies have grown from such interests. For instance, by analyzing the reader's columns, I tried to identify a profile of women readers and the reasons why they read women's magazines. The findings of the study on readers show the importance of the educational function that mass media played in prewar times. Recently I have become interested in the graphic aspects of women's magazines and amin the process of analyzing their covers. Through these researches, I found some similarities between prewar and postwar Japan. I have the impression that people's way of living and way of thinking before Japanese society became fascist are quite similar in many respects to those after World War II. In order to examine the origin of modern gender images or gender relations, it is necessary for me to continue studies and develop my own historical viewpoint more deeply.