In our next lesson, I want to move firmly into the 20th century. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 established Japan in the eyes of the modern Western world but also in East Asia as having broken through, joining the ranks, industrially and militarily, and as far as capital is concerned as well, joining into the ranks of a modernized nation. During the war, the two-year expedition in Northern Korea, Russia, Manchuria, a great deal of postal exchanges or commerce were exchanged between soldiers on the front in various battlefields and the men and women, friends, family lovers, teachers, students who remain behind. Here, I would like to take a look at the relationship between the written word and image, the image, especially of women and women's faces. As we can see in the context of the Russo-Japanese war, picture postcards became popular in the West, Germany, France, Britain, finally the United States from the mid- through the late 19th century. Japanese picture postcards, we can see from the 1870s, the 1880s, but they don't become really, really popular in Japan until the year 1900, when the Japanese government recognizes, allows private postcards to be produced and to be used, rather than government official postcards which were used up until then. So in 1900, Japan, already several decades earlier had joined the universal postal system, joints culturally the sort of boom, or the fashion of creating and sending, writing picture postcards which were already very, very popular in the West from the end of the 19th century. Another one of the big sorts of catalysts, however, for picture postcards being really, really popular in Japan was the Russo-Japanese war. Early in the war, the Japanese government decided and announced that mail letters sent to the frontiers to soldiers who were fighting in the war against Russia, could be sent for free. So there was a great deal of commerce. A great deal of sending letters, especially postcards, back and forth. The so-called military mail service really burgeoned and encouraged people to send postcards very, very regularly, very, very often to the front. The first image to start our lesson with, here is a postcard, one of several hundred postcards which were sent from domestic Japan to the front, to one soldier whose name was Isobe Kunishiro. This man was in the Imperial Army. He was sort of middle-rank officer at a small base in the north of the Korean Peninsula. Anyway, Isobe Kunishiro who came from Yamaguchi in the West of Honshu in Japan here, later on, after the war, became a local politician by the way. During the war, he fought and sent a lot of news about his own circumstances back to his compatriots in Japan. But also at the same time, asked all of the people that he knew, his relatives, friends and so forth to send him as many postcards as possible. And as we can see from the first one, I'm going to turn this over. All of the postcards, the hundreds of postcards, which survive, which were sent to him and which he was able to bring back to his home and survived intact are of women. They're so-called images of beautiful women, 'bijin-ga' in Japanese. Having been sort of translated from the ukiyo-e print genre into photographs. Here, we have a lot of hand-tinted photographs which have become photographic picture postcards. Basically, portraits, I don't want to say portraits because we don't really know who the people are being, who are portrayed in them. They're not actual historical figures but women often Geisha courtesans and so forth, who are hired to dress up often as high-class noble women involved or engaged in private pursuits. Please remember, at the beginning of our second module, when we're looking at many, many images of women which were written and disseminated, consumed from the beginning of the 19th century, there's a lineage of women reading in private, private moments of women immersed in their books. Kitagawa Utamaro drew a very important print image of a woman in 1802 reading during her private time. She was lying down on the tatami mats and sort of holding a book up and reading. Here, we have a woman in Western dress who's dressed up to look like a very, very noble or at least very, very high-class well-to-do merchant young lady reading a Western book. We can assume that she's reading in a Western language, as well, because of the size of the book and so forth. And then underneath it, we can see that the studio that made this postcard left a diagonal white space here for words to be written onto the front of the postcard which is the most often, the most common thing that we see in Japanese postcards of this age. These letters, these postcards were sent by people of all sorts of different ranks and ages and as I said genders as well, in order to encourage Isobe and to allow him to relax a little bit to remember what the domestic situation, land, is like and he also sends them back. We can tell from what is written on the postcards themselves that he's asking them, he's asking his correspondents to gather up as many of these interesting beautiful young ladies as possible and send them to the front and so forth. So we have these dozens and dozens, hundreds literally, of photographs of young women being sent off to the front, in other words, as images of Japanese well-behaved, cultured, cultivated young women in all sorts of different pursuits as I'd like to show you as we go on.
