Western style dancing

"Western Style Dancing," from 1934, depicts the social phenomenon of Western-style ballroom dancing — waltzes, foxtrots, and tangos — that had become fashionable in Japanese urban centers by the early 1930s. Dance halls where couples moved together in Western styles were sites of contested modernity in interwar Japan: signs of cosmopolitan sophistication to some, dangerous foreign influence to others. Kobayakawa renders the scene with the sympathetic directness that characterized all his observations of modern Japanese life, making the couple's movement a cultural as well as physical fact.