Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 2003.

Tabata Yasuko. Ho

Masako to Hino Tomiko. Tokyo: Ko

dansha, 1996.

Takagi Tadashi. Mikudarihan to enkiridera. Tokyo: Ko

dansha, 1992.

Takagi Tadashi. Naite waratte mikudarihan: onna to otoko no enkiri saho

. Tokyo: Kyo

iku

Shuppan, 2001.

Tocco, Martha. ‘‘Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan.’’ In Dorothy Ko, J. Haboush, and

J. Piggott, eds., Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan.

Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press, 2003.

no Haruyuki. ‘‘Nikki ni miru Fujiwara Yorinaga no nanshoku kankei: o

cho

kizoku no vita

sekusuarisu.’’ Hisutoria 84 (1979): 15–29.

Tonomura, Hitomi. ‘‘Women and Inheritance in Japan’s Early Warrior Society.’’ Comparative

Studies in Society and History 32:3 (1990): 592–623.

Tonomura, Hitomi. Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan: The Corporate Villages

of Tokuchin-ho. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Tonomura, Hitomi. ‘‘Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval Japan.’’

American Historical Review 99:1 (1994): 129–54.

Tonomura, Hitomi. ‘‘Sexual Violence against Women: Legal and Extralegal Treatment in

Premodern Warrior Societies.’’ In Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko,

eds., Women and Class in Japanese History. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies Publi-

cations, University of Michigan, 1999.

Totman, Conrad. Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1600–1843 . Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1967.

Tsurumi, E. Patricia. ‘‘The Male Present versus the Female Past: Historians and Japan’s

Ancient Female Emperors.’’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14:4 (1992): 71–5.

Wakita Haruko. Chu

sei ni ikiru onnatachi. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995.

Wakita Haruko, Hayashi Reiko, and Nagahara Kazuko, eds. Nihon joseishi. Tokyo: Yoshikawa

bunkan, 1987.

Wright, Diana. ‘‘Severing the Karmic Ties that Bind: The ‘Divorce Temple’ Mantokuji.’’

Monumenta Nipponica 52:3 (Autumn 1997): 357–80.

Yanagi Miyoko. ‘‘Josei no seikatsu ku

kan: kaku kaiso

o megutte.’’ In Fukuda Mitsuko, ed.,

Onna to otoko no jiku

, Nihon joseishi saiko

,4,Ranjuku suru onna to otoko. Tokyo: Fujiwara

Shoten, 1995.

Yasukuni Ryo

ichi. ‘‘Kinsei Kyo

to no shomin josei.’’ In Joseishi So

Kenkyu

kai, ed., Nihon

joseishi, 3. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1982–3.

Yokota Fuyuhiko. ‘‘Imagining Working Women in Early Modern Japan,’’ trans. Mariko Tama-

noi. In Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Har uko, eds., Women and Class in

Japanese History. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies Publications, University of Michi-

gan, 1999.

Yoshie Akiko. ‘‘Gender in Early Classical Japan: Marriage, Leadershi, and Political Status in

Village and Palace,’’ trans. Janet R. Goodwin. Monumenta Nipponica 60: 4 (winter 2005):

pp. 437–79.

Yoshie Akiko. ‘‘Kodai no mura no seikatsu to josei.’’ In Joseishi So

Kenkyu

kai, ed., Nihon

josei seikatsushi, 1. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1990.

Yoshie Akiko. ‘‘Kodai no kazoku to josei.’’ In Asao Naohiro et al., eds., Iwanami ko

za Nihon

tsu

shi,6,kodai 5. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995.

Yoshie Akiko. ‘‘Kodai joteiron no kako to genzai.’’ In Amino Yoshihiko et al., eds., Tenno

ken o kangaeru,7,jenda

to sabetsu . Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002.

Yoshie Akiko. ‘‘Gender in Early Classical Japan: Marriage, Leadership, and Political Status in

Village and Palace,’’ trans. Janet R. Goodwin. Monumenta Nipponica 60:4 (Winter 2005):

pp. 437–79.

370 HITOMI TONOMURA

Yoshie Akiko. Tsukurareta Himiko: ‘‘onna’’ no so

shutsu to kokka. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo

, 2005.

Yoshikawa Shinji. ‘‘Ritsuryo

kokka no nyokan.’’ In Joseishi So

Kenkyu

kai, ed., Nihon josei

seikatsushi, 1. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1990.

FURTHER READING

Additional useful collections of essays include Gail Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese

Women, 1600–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), which covers the

Tokugawa and modern periods, and Barbara Ruch, ed., Engendering Faith: Women

and Buddhism in Premodern Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies Publi-

cations, University of Michigan, 2002), which contains twenty essays, ten of which

are translations of Japanese works. U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal regularly offers an

‘‘English Supplement’’ with both translations of the Japanese articles and English-

language works. The Japanese-language field of women’s history has advanced expo-

nentially since the publication in the 1980s and early 1990s of the multivolume

collections Joseishi So

Kenkyu

kai, ed., Nihon joseishi, 5 vols. (Tokyo: Tokyo

Daigaku Shupp ankai, 1982–3); Joseishi So

Kenkyu

kai, ed., Nihon josei seikatsushi,

5 vols. (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1990); and Wakita Haruko, Bosei o tou,2

vols. (Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin, 1985). A full list of relevant titles, including English-

language works, is in Nihon joseishi kenkyu

bunken mokuroku, 1–4 (Tokyo: Tokyo

Daigaku Shuppankai, 1983– ), with volume 5 for thcoming.

WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN PREMODERN JAPAN 371

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Gender and Sexuality in

Modern Japan

Sally A. Hastings

In the modern Japanese nation-state, as elsewhere, the official positions of the state

have until quite recen tly been filled by men and the state has been conceptualized as a

family, with women in supporting roles. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 represented a

sharp break with the hereditary social order of the past. As men donned Western style

military uniforms and suits and left the house to carry out the functions of modernity

in military barracks, schools, and government offices, it might seem that men were

constructing modernity while women continued to live traditional lives. In point of

fact, the modern state required the productive as well as the reproductive labor of

women. As men left home to work in factories, government offices, and far-flung

corners of the empire, women bore different but equally critical responsibilities for

reproducing culture. Their duties were by no means confined to the home. More-

over, the experience of women living under the modern Japanese state was influenced

for decades by the variety of regional and class cultures that existed in Tokugawa

(1600–1868) Japan.

Although historical change occurs incrementally, it is easier to conceptualize it in

broad periods. For the purposes of this essay, the periodization provided by the

imperial reigns works rather well to divide the modern era into three parts. The

first broad period of the modern era coincides with the reign of the Meiji Emperor

(1868–1912), when the basic institutions of modern Japan took shape. Gender was

essential to national identity and ordinary people experienced change as the govern-

ment and the capitalist economy intruded into local life. The death of the Meiji

Emperor in 1912 and the succession of his son, the Taisho

Emperor, provides a

somewhat artificial demarcation for an era that lasted until 1945, one characterized by

a more mature industrial economy, enhanced communication and transportation,

mass participation, highly contested politics, and, last but by no means least, war and

defeat. The postwar era marked a new beginning not only because of the legal reforms

under the American occupat ion that enfranchised women and gave them other legal

rights but also because of economic changes that shaped women’s roles in the home

and in the labor force.

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

The Tokugawa Heritage

In conventional accounts of women’s history, the Tokugaw a era was a valley of

darkness, the culmination of centuries of military rule that had deprived women of

the cultural privileges and property rights they had enjoyed in the Heian era. In such

narratives, passages from the prescriptive text Onna daigaku provide the proof of

women’s lowly estate. The only redeeming feature of the era is the class hierarchy that

allowed women of the merchant or peasant classes relatively more freedom in com-

parison to their upper-class sisters.

Recent scholarship allows us a much more nuanced understanding of the society

from which the modern Japanese state emerged. One important contribution is

Martha Tocco’s deconstruction of the iconic status of the Onna daigaku; she pro-

vides an understanding of the context in which the prescriptive literature was read.

Moreover, literary scholars and art historians have drawn attention to the fact that

under warrior government women were not entirely excluded from cultural and

intellectual life. Arakida Reijo, one of the most prolific female authors in Japanese

history, wrote during the Tokugawa era. Ema Saiko

(1787–1861), a physician’s

daughter who became an outstanding Chinese-style painter and poet, was exceptional

but by no means unique. She compiled a scroll that included the work of twenty-two

other wom en. In an illuminating essay, Atsuko Sakaki reflects on how and why such

writers have been selectively remembered.

Anne Walthall brings a historian’s insight

to the question of how a peasant woman could use the conventions of classical poetry

to reduce the differences that separated samurai from commoner, man from woman.

In her biography of Matsuo Taseko, a peasant woman active in poetry circles, Walthall

draws attent ion to the several women who were political actors in the events leading

up to the Meiji Restoration.

The musical talents of courtesans and geisha were, of

course, an essential component of the culture of the licensed prostitution quarter of

the era.

Any study of women’s work must take into account the fact that the vast majority

of women in the Tokugawa era lived in peasant households. Young women from poor

families might be sent out as indentured servants to wealthier households. To

contribute to the economy of their families, married women in ordinary farm families

planted, cultivated, weeded, and harvested both paddy field and vegetable plots.

Farm women at all levels of the village hierarchy engaged in spinning, weaving, and

sewing.

Women of other classes were far from idle. The wives of merchants or

artisans were often directly engaged in the family business. Even women of high

samurai rank worked as ladies-in-waiting, wet nurses, or governesses in the house-

holds of feudal lords. In ordinary samurai households, women prepared food, wove

cloth, sewed clothing, and entertained guests. From Kate Wildman Nakai’s transla-

tion of Yamakawa Kikue’s record of her mother’s life, we see that samurai women also

laundered the bedding and even gardened.

Whatever class a woman was bor n into, her relationship to the larger society was

determined by her position within the househo ld (ie) system, a construct that has

attracted considerable scholarly attention. Customs with respect to premarital sexu-

ality, divorce, and remarriage varied considerably with class. A number of scholars

have drawn attention to the fact that, in the Tokugawa era, women were not define d

GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN 373

primarily as mothers. Because of their considerable responsibilities for productive

labor, women often spent little time caring for the children to whom they had given

birth. Instead, childcare responsibilities were widely shared among grandparents,

older siblings, and maids. Fathers, rather than mothers, had ultimate responsibility

for raising children.

Because the Tokugaw a rulers and their feudal retainers cared about maintaining

the productive labor of their ter ritories, they cared about women’s bodies. Beginning

in the late seventeenth century, domainal authorities condemned abortion and in-

fanticide as unnatural. At the same time, the boundary between wives and prostitutes

became more fixed. As Susan Burns has noted, ‘‘the reproducing female body

had become implicated in the authority of the household and the state.’’

Although

some critics blamed failed pol itical policy for infanticide, the dominant discourse

shifted the onus to immoral parents. In this moral framework the Kagawa school of

obstetrics, which prided itself on saving women’s lives by using instruments to extract

a fetus, became subject to accusations that their practitioners were performing

abortions.

Reproductive sex is, of course, impl icit in studies of demography, political

economy, and Confucian morality of government and household. Until the

late 1980s, however, academic study of sexual desire has been relatively rare,

especially with respect to same-sex relationships. Paul Schalow broke this silen ce

with a number of literary studies.

In Cartograph ies of Desire, Gregory Pflugfelder

provides a constructionist analysis of male–male erotic desires and practices. His

investigation of the popular and legal discourses on male–male love in the Tokugawa

era illuminate the woodblock prints and popular fiction (particularly that of Ihara

Saikaku, 1642–93) already known to Anglophone students of Japanese culture

through many fine translations. Pflugfelder articulates clearly that in the Edo

period male–male erotic behavior was widely acknowledged to be part of Japane se

history.

Meiji

The new Japanese government established in 1868 in the name of the emperor

was instrumental in defini ng new roles for women. As the young leaders set out

to transform Japan into a strong and wealthy nation, they abolished the feudal

domains and asserted the authority of the central government to appoint officials

and collect taxes. The new government proclaimed an end to the feudal distinctions

of the past and with the establishment of a conscript military it defined the modern

Japanese subject as male.

The Meiji state, like its Tokugawa predecessor, relied

upon bureaucrats to carry out its functions. By the end of the Meiji era, the

higher schools and imperial university established to produce bureauc ratic

leaders deliberately inculcated an anti-female masculinity that eschewed anything

effeminate. The rough, spiritual masculinity of the monastic higher schools

stood in contrast to a more refined masculinity, that of the dandified Western

gentleman, whose characteristics were acquired through travel abroad and mastery

of etiquette books. The spiritual masculinity won recognition as an authentic,

374 SALLY A. HASTINGS

indigenous national identity in contrast to the degenerate material culture of the

West.

Women’s history reflected the dominance of political themes in national history in

that some of the first scholarly works on women in the Meiji period were accounts of

the women such as Kishida Toshiko (1863–1901) and Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927),

who joined the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (jiyu

minken undo

) to assert

that women, too, deserved political rights.

Recent work by Mara Patessio affords us

a glimpse of how a broader range of women joined this movement.

There has also

been considerable interest in the participation of women such as Kanno Suga in the

early socialist and anarchist movements.

It was not until the late Meiji period that

the Japanese state formally excluded women from even attending polit ical meetings

and articulated the notion that women should contribute to society as productive

‘‘good wives and wise mothers.’’

This formulation emerged only after Japan’s quest

to establish its proper place in the community of nations generated considerable

anxiety about gender relations. How should women dress? What social events should

they attend? Women’s bodies, whether those of mothers or of prostitutes, were

contested sites of national identity.

For women, one of the most important aspects of state formation was the estab-

lishment of a modern educational system that mandated elementary education for

both boys and girls. The Meiji leaders recognized that in the eyes of the Western

powers the accomplishments of women were a measure of the level of civilization. In

1871, the government sent five girls to the United States for education. Two

returned to Japan after a short time, but three spent ten years in the United States.

Once back in Japan the American-educated women provided leadership in education

and in feminine activities such as charity bazaars and women’s associations. The

youngest of the three, Tsuda Umeko, founded what is now Tsuda College in 1900.

The short-lived Takebashi Girls’ School in Tokyo was another government experi-

ment of the 1870s.

By the end of the Meiji era the required number of years of education for all

children had been set at six and there was fairly high compliance with the law. To be

sure, for much of the era parents were quicker to send their sons than their daughters

to school, and the illiterate mother, dependent upon her childre n to read simple

communications, remained a familiar figure. For the girls whose parents encouraged

education, it was exhilarating to succeed in a predominantly male environment.

Moreover, there developed jobs for women with academic skills. Recognizing

that women who were teachers of children in the home could serve the state as

educators in state-sponsored schools, the leaders of the central state established the

Women’s Normal School in 1874. Because of its interest in women’s bodies, the state

asserted its right to license midwives and nurses and fostered education for those

careers.

With the exception of the Women’s Normal School, in the early Meiji era, most

educational opportunities for women’s education bey ond the elementary school

level were in private hands. Christian missionaries made women’s education one

of their goals, and some schools that continue in existence today claim origins in

the 1870s and 1880s.

In parallel to these institutions funded and staffed from

overseas, the daughters, wives, and widows of Confucian scholars founded schools for

girls that emphasized study of the Chinese classics. These schools, too, claim origins

GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN 375

in the early Meiji era. By the end of the nineteenth century the government had

mandated girls’ higher schools in every prefecture. Two institutions founded at the

turn of the centur y by Japanese Christians, Tsuda English Academy and Japan

Women’s College, emerged as important sites for women’s education in the liberal

tradition.

The vast majority of Japanese women were integrated into the economic produc-

tion of the nation through their households, and most of those households were, of

course, engaged in agriculture. Scholarly interest in women’s work, however, has

focused primarily on the young women who left their villages to work in spinning and

textile factories, where they constituted a significant portion of the industrial labor

force. In her classic study, Patricia Tsurumi drew on contemporary government

reports and the songs of the factory girls themselves to recover their work experi-

ences.

A recent essay by Anne Walthall illustrates how a woman with cultural capital

could leverage it into income in the new Meiji society.

One site for scholarly analysis

of women’s domestic duties has been the ‘‘home’’ (katei), a word newly coined in the

Meiji era. A phenomenon occurring among urban professional households in the late

nineteenth century, the home centered on the nuclear rather than the extended

family. Kathleen Uno shows how the separation of work and home came to define

mothers as the primary caretakers of children.

All aspects of women’s lives were

reflected in the works of important women writers. Robert Danly’s translations of

Higuchi Ichiyo first opened Meiji women’s writings to Western readers. Rebecca

Copeland has ably contextualized Higuchi’s work within the broader array of women

who wrote in this era such as Miyake Kaho, Wakamatsu Shizuko, and Shimizu

Shikin.

By the end of the Meiji era, there had taken shape a number of organizations that

allowed women to work in public for the good of society without impinging on the

male monopoly on political rights. The Red Cross incorporated the wives of peers and

bureaucrats into its ranks. Elite women were also recruited into organizations to

promote education, hygiene, and support for the mil itary. The Patriotic Women’s

Association, founded in 1901, soon had local branches throughout Japan.

Al-

though most of these women’s organizations mobilized women to act on behalf of

the state, there were some instances of organized women criticizing the existing

order. In 1886 Yajima Kajiko founded the Tokyo Women’s Reform Society, which

eventually affiliated with the International Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

The Women’s Reform Society petitio ned the government regarding social problems

such as concubinage and licensed prostitution, both at home and overseas. The

members likewise demanded that the government institute monogamy. Women

also agitated on behalf of women’s political rights. Yajima Kajiko, the writer Shimizu

Shikin, and others expressed their outrage in 1890 when women were barred as even

observers to the newly instituted Diet proceedings, a decision that was soon

rescinded.

Men and women who did not fit within the state construction of the

male national subject and his home graced by a legal wife were increasingly sub-

sumed under a medicalized discourse. The state stigmatized female prostitutes as

sources of venereal disease that threatened the health of men, and this taint ex-

tended to women such as waitresses and factory workers who ventured outside

the home to earn money. Under the influence of Western discourse, there

376 SALLY A. HASTINGS

developed a concept of ‘‘same-sex love,’’ which was categorized as abnormal. In

popular culture, male–male sexuality was relegated to the margins of civilization,

to the feudal past, to the southwest periphery of the archipelago, and to adoles-

cence.

Taisho

and Early Sho

The first prominent feminist literary organization coincides roughly with the dawn of

the Taisho

era. The women of the Bluestocking Society, which began publication of its

literary magazine in September 1911, aspired to give expression to their literary

creativity. In contrast to the women of the People’s Rights and socialist movements,

they demanded the recognition not only of human rights but also of female sexuality.

Hiratsuka Raicho

provided the leadership for the endeavor and well-known writers

such as Yosano Akiko and Tamura Toshiko contributed their work.

The promin ent

writers who participated in the Bluest ocking Society differed among themselves on the

centrality of motherhood to self-fulfillment and they aired their disagreements in the

pages of newspapers and general circulation magazines as well as in women’s period-

icals. These debates have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Scholars from the

disciplines of both history and literature have written about Hiratsuka Raicho

,Ito

Noe, and Yamakawa Kikue.

The members of the Bluestocking Society challenged

prescribed gender roles not only in their rhetoric but also in their lives. Several

members were involved in sexual scandals, some with men and some with women.

The efforts of the Bluestockings to organize women on behalf of women’s self-

realization were soon followed by women’s organizations dedicate d to obtaining

women’s political rights. The victory of the democratic powers in World War I and

mass demonstrations at home in 1918 against rising rice prices prompted demands

for universal manhood suffrage. Whereas in the Freedo m and People’s Rights Move-

ment women had joined in demands for rights not yet enjoyed by any Japanese

subjects, in the Taisho

period, women were joining a chorus of Japanese subjects

such as workers and petty bourgeoisie who demanded a voice in the polity to which

they were contributing their wealth as well as their sons. The cause of women’s

suffrage met with modest success in 1931 when the cabinet of Prime Minister

Hamaguchi Osachi sponsored a bill supporting limited voting rights for women.

To be sure, the bill woul d not have bestowed upon women rights equal to those of

men. The women’s suffrage movement in fact opposed the bill, which was in any case

rejected by the upper house. A s Sharon Nolte noted, howeve r, ‘‘the bill signified the

achievement of legitimacy for women’s rights.’’

The outbreak of the Manchurian Incident on September 18, 1931 marked the

beginning of an era when a sense of crisis in Japan delegitimized reformist efforts such

as the extension of suffrage to women. The All-Japan Women’s Suffrage Congress

continued to meet, but by 1935, it had retreated from its earlier emphasis on peace

and suffrage. The outbreak of full-scale war in China in 1937 prompted mobilization

of all national resources and women’s organizations, too, cooperated with the war

regime. By 1937, large numbers of women had already been recruited into the older

Patriotic Women’s Association and the newly formed Wome n’s National Defense

Association. In February 1942, all women’s groups were amalgamated into the

GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN 377

Greater Japan Women’s Association. The mobilization of the nation for war included

the incorporation of women’s expertise into national commissions; the suffragist

Ichikawa Fusae was amon g those who accepted an appointment to an official com-

mittee.

In the economic and social realm, scholars have devoted considerable attention

to the varieties of women’s work in early twentieth-century Japan. In the Taisho

and early Sho

wa eras, the growth of the national economy created a greater variety of

jobs for women. Whereas women constituted only 6.5 percent of white collar

employees in 1930, by 1940 they occup ied 15 percent of such jobs.

Margit Nagy

and Barbara Sato have explored the experience of women working in newly creat ed

urban positions such as telephone operator, bus girl, and office worker. Mariko

Tamanoi has drawn our attention to the komori, the caretakers of poor rural children.

Regine Mathias has illuminated the lives of women coalminers in the early twentieth

century.

Historians of women have also been attentive to the fact that women

continued well into the twentieth century to constitute more than half of the

industrial workforce.

Women who worked outside the home became objects of

fascination to the mass media. Barbara Sato and Miriam Silverberg have investigated

the imagined construct of the ‘‘modern girl’’ that flourished in the 1920s, while

Silverberg and Elise Tipton have written about the relationship of the modern to the

invention of the cafe waitress.

At a more elite level, women activists, actors, and

writers were well-known figures whose pictures and opinions appeared in the mass

media. Such public figures were particularly prominent in the pages of women’s

magazines.

In the early twentieth century, sexuality was conceptualized as either normal or

perverted. Same-sex love, whether between men or between women, was classified as

perverted. Same-sex relationships between women came to public notice through

schoolgirl crushes and double suicides. The idea of perversion quickly became part of

popular discourse where, in contrast to its condemnation in medical literature, it was

consumed and celebrated.

The Takarazuka all-female revue, founded in 1913, was

one of the forms in which perversion was consumed. The glamor of the revue

provided a respite from the domesticity prescribed for women by society.

When Japan becam e engaged in full-scale war on the Asian continent in 1937, the

state took greater interest in the reproductive functions of women than in the

contributions they could make to industrial production. Onl y unmarried women

were recruited as factory labor. In keeping with that policy, the generation of

women who attended higher schools during the war spent considerable time in the

production of munitions. The emphasis in government policy on women was, how-

ever, on motherhood in the service of the state. Mothers were expected to have large

families and to sacrifice their sons.

The state was interested not only in how many

children women had but also in the genetic quality of Japan’s population. In the

1930s the fledgling field of sexology was overshadowed by the emergence of the

concept of ‘‘racial hygiene.’’ Socialist feminists, who argued that birth control was

preferable to continental expansion as a solution to Japan’s population problem, had

contributed to the development of a eugenic discourse that denied the right of

reproduction to victims of certain diseases such as mental illness, syphilis, and tuber-

culosis and recommended sterilization for some. Eugenic thinking was codified in the

National Eugenics Law of 1940.

378 SALLY A. HASTINGS

Because of its desire to manage the sexuality of soldiers, the state also facilitated

non-reproductive sex. The right to regulate prostitution, which the state enjoyed in

the home islands, expanded in wartime to direct management of military brothels. A

high percentage of the women lured into this system of sexual slavery were Korean.

As some of these women have come forward in the 1980s and 1990s to make claims

against the Japanese government, Japanese feminists have been active in exposing

wrongdoing and fighting for compensation.

Postwar

Under the shadow of military defeat and foreign occupation, the women of Japan

acquired legal rights equal to those of men. In December 1946 the Japanese parlia-

ment, admittedly under some pressure from the occupation authorities, passed

legislation that gave women the right to vote and run for office. Significant numbers

of women availed themselves of these rights. On April 10, 1946, in the first election

in which women could participate, seventy-nine women stood as candidates and

thirty-nine won seats. At a time when there were only ten women in the US

Congress, these were dramatic results, and there has been a modest degree of

scholarly attention to these events.

In fact, this success rate could not be sustained.

Although a considerable number of women were willing to take their places in

politics, the political world was not prepared to incorporate them. All but four of

the thirty-nine ran for re-election, but only fourteen of them ever again held a

national legislative seat. (The number of votes per voter and the boundaries of the

election districts were changed between 1946 and 1947 in ways that worked against

independent candidates.) Seven of the fourteen, however, continued in office at least

until 1968. The national constituency of the newly formed upper house provided

access to office to women of national renown. Although it was not easy for women to

win political office, the total number of women in the Japanese legislature never fell

below twenty.

Elected women were conspicuous in debates about legislation affecting the lives of

women, including the revision of the eugenics law and the passage of the anti-

prostitution law in 1956. Their roles varied from impassioned advocacy to decorous

representation of their parties. Although a few women we re elected as independents

representing feminist interests (most notably Ichikawa Fusae), the maj ority of elected

women functioned as members of the party to which they belonged. As advocates of

peace and members of student organizations, women participated in civic movemen ts

such as the anti-government agitation surrounding the revision of the security treaty

with the United States in 1960. Women were also active in new citizen movements

addressing consumer and environmental issues. The citizen movements, which devel-

oped beginning in the mid-1950s, maintained independence from the political

parties.

The 1947 constitution guaranteed women legal equality with men.

The docu-

ment explicitly states that marriage should be based on the equal rights of husband

and wife. Policies on the choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, place of

residence, and divorce should all conform with ‘‘the essential equality of the sexes.’’

GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN 379