Sunflowers in Japanese culture
When Japanese hear “a girl in a sunflower”, many of them naturally think of a girl running in a white dress with a white hat on, of course the weather is totally fine.This article tries to reveal why this cultural common sense happens, by explaining the history of Japanese culture in post WW II period.
Dreaming for the West
Since Meiji-era from late 1800s at the end of Edo-era that was a Samurai-era when Japan started a rapid modernization, “Modernization” meant “Westernization” or “Americanization” for the Japanese government at that time, and they thought that Japanese culture should become “modernized”.At that time, Western countries invaded and colonized other Asian countries using their modernized armies, saying that they just wanted to share the “benefits” of the modernized technologies.
Therefore, Japanese government had no choice but modernizing the country by themselves in order to get treated equally by them.
This ideology spread into their people as the government intentioned. Even Japanese people in this age shares this.
But how this ideology culturally spread? A Japanese artist seems to have played an important role in this cultural propagation.
Junichi Nakahara
Junichi Nakahara (中原淳一, 1913-1983) is a Japanese illustrator and editor.
Before the WWII started, he had already been overwhelmingly popular among Japanese girls for his Western style drawings that he afterwards made polished through his staying in Paris (reference in Japanese).
Just after the end of the war, he established two magazines in 1946 and in 1947 just after the end of the WWII and named it “Soleiu” (Soleil “ソレイユ”) and “Himawari” (Sunflower “ひまわり”) for each, hoping that the magazine would give girls hopes and dreams even when most part of the Japan got completely destroyed in the war and there seemed to be no future remaining.
(You can see his biography thorough the official web site.)
These magazines encouraged girls who were disappointed by the loose of the war and became a compass of girl’s fashion, spreading his message of “how girls should be?” and this message largely affected Japanese culture.
A girl in a White dress
In the magazines, he expected girls to be innocent and chesty, seeing simple white dresses as symbolic clothes because if girls in this kind of clothes got any kind of dirt, it cannot be “white” any more.
At the same time, Japan had an enormously boom of Audrey Hepburn who also sometimes wore this same kind of clothes, which made this fashion very popular in Japan.
At the same time, Japan had an enormously boom of Audrey Hepburn who also sometimes wore this same kind of clothes, which made this fashion very popular in Japan.
In addition, his works displayed girls in this fashion with sunflowers on the background.
Since then, Japanese people started to relates white dresses with sunflowers.
Since then, Japanese people started to relates white dresses with sunflowers.
Next Article
Next article will tell some short stories about Japanese typical summer. This theme relates to the former articles. Please read them as well.Model
Wakana Saitoh (齋藤若菜): one of the finalist of Miss Todai 2018 (the University of Tokyo).
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