![Fig. 22. Based on the photograph used in Plastic Lover’s YouTube upload of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love,” the online digital artist Rabbit Princess portrays a two-dimensional version of Takeuchi. Plastic Love. [October 5, 2018]. Pixiv, accessed March 2, 2021. https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/71029401.](https://perpetualcontemplationcom.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/71029401_p0.png?w=656&h=300&crop=1)
By conducting a brief historiophoty of women in Japanese art, it is revealed how the Edo’s flawless female beauties have persisted into the present. Furthermore, one discovers that these beauties never existed in any real state; rather, they were always an idealized expression of the Japanese woman.
Through Sebastian Conrad’s continuities of rule, islands of power, the struggle for legitimacy, and the use of violence against colonized subjects, it can be understood how colonized subjects reacted to structures of German colonial society in positive, passive, and negative ways.
It appears that there was no set definition for what constituted both German nationalism and Germanness, and this is only made more apparent when analyzing how the loose definitions of both changed over time.
According to David Ciarlo, it was not simply “empire” that the Germans were obsessed with, but the “display of empire in grand, well-crafted, artful stagings.” Like exhibitions in Britain and France, Germany’s 1890s exhibitions portrayed Germany as being a colony-holding world power.
The German colonial state was largely built upon already established forms of rule in any given colony, but German rule was largely weak. This weakness was due to a “lack of legitimacy and of ideological hegemony,” and therefore Conrad viewed it as “no coincidence that violence and warfare…were inherent in the colonial system.”
Why is it that we eat what we eat? Why is it that certain foods are familiar and comforting, while others remain strange and exotic? My own experiences have shaped my preferences, and that means some foods will always be representative of the Other. One dish in particular is as much a part of my life and memory as it is foreign. Ramen, a dish that has been so cheap and ubiquitous throughout my life, is a dish with a long and rich history that is representative of the way our respective circumstances have shaped our perspective of food as it relates our identities.
![Fig. 7. In a markedly different style, this shin-hanga painting is another display of the moga’s Western appearance as described by the scholars Barbaraō and Miriam Silverberg. Café and Flapper [1927]. From the Honolulu Museum of Art.](https://perpetualcontemplationcom.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/kafe-to-modan-1.jpg?w=656&h=300&crop=1)
During a decade of rapid change, modernity created within Japan an identity crisis in which the broader Japanese culture suffered from an “authenticity complex;” the moga embodies the clash between East and West in Japan’s late Taishō and early Shōwa periods, and this clash within her reveals how her eroticism was at once both uniquely Japanese and universally Western. Thus, an exploration of the moga in the East must first begin in the West.
