Shōjo gahō, September 1926 (cover)

Cover of Shōjo gahō (少女画報, Girls' Pictorial), September 1926 issue, designed by Takabatake Kashō for the Tokyo publisher Tōkyō-sha. September was a transitional month in the Japanese magazine year — the end of summer, the start of the autumn school term — and Kashō's cover combines decorative motifs of early autumn with the kind of contemporary girl figure he had made the magazine's signature image. Shōjo gahō ran from 1912 to 1942 and was, alongside Shōjo kurabu, the central venue for the modern shōjo aesthetic: a complex visual idiom that took bijin-ga conventions inherited from Edo and Meiji ukiyo-e and reframed them around contemporary girlhood, schoolgirl uniforms, and Taishō-chic Western fashion. The original scan was produced for the Kikuyo Town Library digital collection and entered Wikimedia Commons in the public domain.