moga, a contraction of the English words “modern girl,” and the male counterpart of the moga was naturally called the mobo. Moving pictures, either from Hollywood or made in Japan on Hollywood patterns, had a tremendous vogue, and American jazz and Western social dancing were popular with the more sophisticated. Taxi-dance halls appeared; all-girl musical comedy troupes rivaled the popularity of the movies; Western style and Chinese style restaurants became numerous; and there was a mushroom growth of so-called “cafés”—small “beer joints,” where cheap victrolas ground out American jazz and emancipated young men enjoyed the company of pretty young waitresses of doubtful morals.
The Japanese threw themselves into Western sports with enthusiasm. Baseball and tennis were already extremely popular. Now they concentrated on track and field sports as well, with a view to making better showings at the Olympic games, and they actually came to dominate the Olympic swimming events. Golf links were built for the rich, and the middle classes took up skiing. Baseball, however, remained the great national sport, and university and middle school baseball games drew crowds comparable to those attending major college football and big league baseball games in the United States.
There were many other less striking but even more significant aspects of the new culture of the Japanese cities. The great literary movement started in the time of Natsume Soseki continued with growing vigor. Thousands of books poured off the Japanese presses, and the literature of the whole world became available