A close reading of “The Playboy Dialect,” a classic sharebon, or narrative of fashion and manners in the pleasure quarters of Edo-period Japan, where a consumer culture, to rival anything concocted by the capitalist dictatorships of the Century of the Self, was wielded as a weapon of class struggle by the rising urban commoner class against the de facto feudal rulers, the samurai.
","author_name":"Fergal Schmudlach"}