Bad Girls from Good Families: The Degenerate Meiji Schoolgirl

Abstract

Whether idly spending their free time in Hibiya Park,³ experimenting with the latest hairstyles of the day, gossiping about the cute schoolboys they met on the street, or seriously poking their noses in schoolbooks, “bad” girls from good families did not embody the ideal of Japanese womanhood that their “good” girl classmates epitomized. Following the promulgation of the Girls’ Higher School Order (Kōtō jogakkō rei) in 1899,⁴ a small number of society’s elite daughters found themselves newly situated within the liminal space of the girls’ higher school. For the first time, wealthy daughters from the provinces were relocating to the city and intermingling with the natives at Tokyo’s best higher schools. Many of these girls, away from the surveillance of family and servants for the first time, were able to form new communities comprised of both Tokyo residents and non-Tokyoites. Precisely due to its liminal characteristics, the fledgling system of the girl’s higher school inadvertently provided the girls with opportunities extending beyond the walls of the classroom. Consequently, the emerging schoolgirl culture made it possible for the girls to position themselves in public spaces that had previously been off limits. As will become evident, it was their negotiation of these new spaces that largely defined their status as “good” or “bad.”

The sound of the bell was loud, and followed by the appearance of a beautiful, well-bred young lady of eighteen or nineteen. The long sleeves of her arrow-feather patterned kimono fluttering in the wind, her hair swept back at the sides and fastened with an innocent white ribbon, adorned in her ebicha hakama,¹ she was riding on a Dayton bicycle, her slender shoulders gliding.

—Kosugi Tengai, Makaze koikaze ²