In September 1923, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck the Tokyo area triggering thousands of aftershocks, raging fires, and the massacre of resident Koreans by Japanese citizens. What came to be known as the Great Kanto earthquake devastated the capital, ravaging the low city with particular ferocity. As Tokyoites rebuilt their city and their daily lives, changes that had been stirring for the past couple of decades accelerated. The many residents who moved out of the low city helped shift the capital’s center of gravity westward into Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Suginami wards and the suburbs beyond. The white-collar, middle-class suburban commuter had an increasingly recognizable pattern of living. An urban culture of consumption and leisure flourished, from the department store to the café. And the “modern girl” appeared in Tokyo as she did in cities around the world, embodying the promises and threats of shifting roles for women, pleasures and perils of consumerism, and allures and dangers of cosmopolitan entertainment. The urban culture of the post-earthquake years persisted into the 1930s as the nation edged closer to fascism and deepened its commitment to war.

A summary of the early career of Johann Strauss (Father), the wider dance culture in Vienna and the role of music publishers.

This chapter examines the decline of the brothel as a commercial form in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the recasualization of sex work in the context of women’s changing labor arrangements and the growth of urban leisure culture. Baltimore’s brothels, in keeping with patterns in other US cities, lost their prominence as a sexual labor arrangement as the result of changing land use patterns, new styles of courting, and evolving work and housing arrangements for young laborers. With the rise of new types of urban leisure, young women who sold or traded sex increasingly resorted to concert saloons, dance halls, and amusement parks to solicit men and to furnished room houses to carry out their trysts. Once-taboo forms of sexual exchange became incorporated into the courting and leisure culture of young working people. Brothels, which in many ways reflected an outmoded, domestic model of courtship, had to embrace niche sexual markets in a struggle to compete for labor and customers.