Archival photo courtesy of Saint Louis University.
After a 10-minute delay spent fiddling with the projector and grudgingly joking that she had to “double as I.T.,” Duke University Associate Professor Gennifer Weisenfeld began her guest lecture on “Tokyo Consumer Culture After the Earthquake” Monday night at 5:30 in Kresge. She spoke about how the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 influenced Japanese art and popular culture in the ensuing years of its aftermath.
“Earthquakes are generative events,” Weisenfeld said. Her central argument is that Kanto’s massive devastation of Tokyo engendered a deep emotional response in the commercial photography, print design and painting that were popular at the time, cutting across social classes and political groups. Everyone was hit—uptown, downtown, elitist and proletarian.
These artistic reactions to the quake came not only in different media but also in different tones and intentions, from the sympathetic images of mourning created by oil painters to the colorful, absurdist cartoons satirizing the squalid living conditions during reconstruction. Many works depicted a giant catfish as the cause of the ruin, symbolizing a popular belief that it was divine retribution for ‘20s materialism and decadence. As Weisenfeld commented, “Beauty and horror, shock and awe go together.”
Sorry, though, no scantily clad Japanese schoolgirls.