Afterword: AND some NOT SO BAD

Abstract

We now know that notwithstanding the stellar example of Abe Sada bad can mean rightfully vengeful wronged women (the warp and weft of legends), unconventional make-up, and for the Japanese consumer in Paris—just bad shopping. In other words, not only can Japanese girls continue to change class just as they have under every imperial reign, some persist in what we in the bourgeois west have termed “unladylike” behavior, thereby breaking the gender line. Witness the cultured daughters of Tokugawa era entrepreneurs, or more recently, Empress Michiko rendered wraithlike (ghostly from years of monitoring by the Imperial Household Ministry, we must presume). Moreover, we have learned that not only sex can be altered; sex and race can change and must be added to the options available to the postmodern girl who would dare to be bad in late capitalist Japan.¹