away old, outworn modes of life, and cleared the ground literally for a new city, and figuratively for a new culture.
Downtown Tokyo became a city of wide thoroughfares and of many great steel and reinforced concrete buildings, resembling in sections the cities of Europe and America more than those of Asia. The Marunouchi district around the main Tokyo railway station was the pride of the nation and a symbol of the new modernized Japan. Other cities followed Tokyo’s lead, and soon modern office buildings of steel, school buildings in concrete, large movie houses, an occasional great stadium, and sprawling railway stations were the typical architecture of Japanese cities.
Family solidarity, paternal authority, and male dominance remained the salient features of Japanese society, but increasingly the younger generation in the cities joined the world-wide revolt of youth and began to question time-honored social customs. College students, attracted to liberal or radical political philosophies, embraced the freer social concepts of the West, and there was a growing demand on the part of youth to be allowed to make marriages of love rather than marriages arranged by families through go-betweens. Women office workers became a feature of the new social system, and under occidental influence, many middle class Japanese men began to treat their wives almost as social equals. The women of Japan began slowly to free themselves from their traditional position as domestic drudges.
The symbol of the 1920’s in Japan, as in the United States, was the “flapper,” called by the Japanese the