Facing Modernity: Japanese Women and Hygienic Facial Culture (Biganjutsu) in the Early Twentieth Century

This article aims to capture a discrete historical moment—the emergence of “hygienic facial culture” or eisei biganjutsu (hereafter referred to as biganjutsu, the art or technique of the beautiful face)—in early modern Japan.1 Hygienic facial culture was an important feature of middleand upper-class Japanese women’s lives from 1905 to the late 1920s, and it was both a professional career option for the upwardly mobile and a form of cosmopolitan leisure for the wealthy. Originally denoting a method of facial massage performed with electrovibratory machines, the term biganjutsu eventually came to include cosmetic surgery, care of the hair, nails, and other extensions of the skin, as well as makeup application and fashion advice. Imported from the United States and practiced throughout Europe, hygienic facial culture marks Japan’s early participation in an international beauty dialogue whose boundaries were set by the physiological discourse of modern biomedicine.2 The present exploration of biganjutsu contributes to the larger history of early twentieth-century Japan by providing critical insight into how middle and upper-class women shaped and were shaped by changing beauty practices in a rapidly transforming society. An understanding of biganjutsu is particularly useful for exploring the connections between women and consumption in modern Japan. In the early twentieth century, the media sensationalized biganjutsu—presenting it both as ultra-modern and questionably