This paper problematises the visual representation of the Modern Boy (mobo) in 1920s Japanese popular media as a site of contestation over what constituted desirable masculinity in early twentieth-century Japanese society. On the one hand, the mobos image as a beautiful commodified male points to a renegotiation of masculinity in the direction of a new gender-blurring beauty aesthetic and a subversive contestation of the more normative masculinities of the salaryman and soldier. On the other hand, under the disapproving gaze of the state and social critics, the mobo was also constructed as a parodic, emasculated form of masculinity that reinforced the hegemonic masculine ideal by providing its masculine Other. Interrogating the tensions involved in viewing and desiring the mobo therefore contributes to our understanding of how beauty practices feature in the project of creating the new modern man in interwar Japan and the concurrent representational strategies that work to diffuse threats to hegemonic masculinity.
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