Koyo Kageyama, Modern girls (moga) wearing Beach Pajama style walking down Ginza, Shopping districts and streets in Japan, 1928.
My favorite image representative of Kamakura’s early 20th-century beach culture is Kageyama Koyo’s 1928 photo, “Mogas’ Beach Pajama Style.” Shot in Ginza, this image of three young women strutting confidently down the street in full beach-going attire, sizing up the camera like a potential suitor, shows just how powerful, and even a little subversive, beach culture had become. I can picture the media at the time wringing its hands about these girls, as it would, 70 years later, about Shibuya teens with their ultra-tanned skin and neon-bright clothes, Rebecca Milner for The Japan Times (x).
Modern girls, also shortened to moga, were Japanese women who followed Westernized fashions and lifestyles in the 1920s. These moga were Japan’s equivalent of America’s flappers, Germany’s neue Frauen, France’s garçonnes, or China’s modeng xiaojie. (x)
Kōyō Kageyama (Japanese, 1907-1981) photographed people in Tokyo, Japan during the Shōwa imperial period (1926–1989). This tumultuous time in the country’s history spans 1923’s Great Kantō Earthquake, a depression, rapid militarization, near annihilation during World War II, and the challenges and triumphs generated by the prosperity of the post-war period. (x)
