觀看與展示─ 《臺灣日日新報》廣告欄中的女性圖像

Abstract

The research objective of the present paper is to analyze and interpret the details of the historical background and women’s images depicted in the advertisements in Taiwan Daily News. I intend to conduct some forty case studies selected from the vast amount of the advertisements in that newspaper, so as to discover the women’s images that were constructed, depicted and displayed in the advertisement culture of the Japanese Colonial Period. Regardless of the difficulties, in this research project I find three most common kinds of figure representations throughout the entire Japanese Colonial Period: modern new women, Taiwanese women, and lovely girls in Japanese kimonos. Generally speaking, the three phases defined by different colonial policies in the whole Japanese Colonial Period—the phase of appeasement (1895-191), of assimilation (1919-37) and of kominka (1837-45)—caused no immediate or prominent intervention or gap in the image changes of women in Taiwan Daily News advertisement, the changes in policy notwithstanding. Regardless of some key historical factors, many of the female images were still constructed through different phases, with only some subtleties existing in the difference between the sharp increase and decrease of a certain image. It is especially in the 1910s that a great deal of changes occurred to the women’s images in the advertisements: the rise of the trend of luxury fashion, the increasing extent of openness in the female clothing, etc. These shifts all provide us with another way to understand the Japanese Colonial Period, the colony, and the women. In consideration of the intersection of time, space and human objects, this paper would be focused on how women’s images were constructed in the Taiwan Daily News Advertisement? And, if these women, with their various symbolic meanings, can be taken as another window to through which the Japanese Colonial Period can be seen, how would these gorgeous images impact our visual perception? Bearing these research requests in mind, I choose sign—the most important and most fundamental analytical tool—as the assistance of my explications of women’s images in Taiwan Daily News Advertisement. The research of the present paper is not aimed at constructing an advertisement history of the Japanese Colonial Period, but the advertisement case studies in this paper are aimed merely at reflecting a certain trend of how women’s images were used in the advertisements. With this primary concern, each of these case studies takes as its object one of the various advertisements with a female focus, investigating and analyzing the deep connotation of the images in them, so as to bring the discussion more focused on these displays of women’s images.