Flower Empowerment

Ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging, was first systematized in the fifteenth century, when it was limited to elite male practitioners. It was first widely practiced by women in the early twentieth century, but did not reach mass popularity until the 1950s and 1960s, with an estimated ten million students, over 99 percent of whom were female. While it was still considered by many to be a domestic skill for upper-middle-class housewives, it increasingly offered employment for postwar Japanese women as teachers and even as headmasters (iemoto) of their own schools, allowing women to engage in paid labor without violating traditional gender norms. This chapter traces the trajectory of job opportunities for women in ikebana, examining how educational reforms in the Meiji and postwar periods provided chances to study and obtain teaching licenses in ikebana and how the three largest schools—Ikenobo, Ohara, and Sogetsu—increasingly professionalized their corps of teachers.

Yamakawa Kikue and Edward Carpenter

This chapter focuses on the translation of Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) by Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980) in the early 1910s and the influence on Japanese feminism of the writings of this thinker. While some writings on sexuality in Japan have lumped Carpenter with sexologists who were seen to have brought restrictions upon a premodern flexibility about same-sex relations, we see instead a modernist and international queer discourse to which many connected themselves and through which ideas about sexuality and social ethics were linked and developed. The chapter focuses especially on personal affiliations and translation, as understood through Carpenter’s correspondence with Japanese thinkers and Yamakawa’s personal observations in the feminist community of the Taishō era (1912–1926). Through analysis of rhetorical style and translation choices, this chapter explores the international and interpersonal dynamics of 1920s Japanese feminisms.

From “Motherhood in the Interest of the State” to Motherhood in the Interest of Mothers

In the aftermath of World War II, many Japanese women felt impelled to exorcise “martial motherhood,” a stoic, tearless, child-sacrificing gender ideal constructed by the state throughout the early twentieth century. At the Mothers’ Congress of 1955, mothers from across the country gathered to reclaim motherhood from the state and began to redefine motherhood for themselves in the postwar era. This chapter argues that the Mothers’ Congress represented a moment of transition from the wartime concept of “motherhood in the interest of the state” to the postwar idea of motherhood in the interest of mothers. Furthermore, the influential power of the organizers of Japan’s Mothers’ Congress was fundamental in the creation of the 1955 World Congress of Mothers. This was the first instance in which Japanese women became international feminist leaders, and they did so through the language of matricentric feminism.

Takemura Kazuko

Takemura Kazuko (1954–2011) was a key figure in feminist studies and queer theory between Japan and the U.S. In her late essay, “The Renaissance of a Discipline,” she asks fundamental questions about what it means to do queer or feminist work with a focus on a culture other than one’s own. Herself a Japanese Americanist in a field born from Japan’s “homosocial” desire to emulate and come closer to the British Empire, Takemura looks to Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), the ambivalent founding father of her field, as a model for a new kind of comparative literature described by Gayatri Spivak (1942– ) in her book, Death of a Discipline. By drawing connections between Sōseki and F. O. Mathiessen (1902–1950), the closeted gay man who founded American Studies with his 1941 book American Renaissance, the essay examines the foundations of both American and Japanese Studies, and imagines their queer rebirth.

Dangerous Women and Dangerous Stories

In her two bestselling novels Grotesque and Real World, Kirino Natsuo (1951–) contrasts the commodified sexuality of young women with the sexual alienation of older women. Through her fiction, the author responds to several strands of discourse on women and social responsibility that shaped public policy in Japan during the late 1990s, in which women were blamed for issues such as Japan’s low birthrate and economic stagnation. At the center of these debates was women’s sexuality, which politicians and the media alternately worshipped and villainized. Kirino critiques the contradictions inherent in these discourses by demonstrating their effect on her female characters, who find themselves trapped in a cycle of outwardly imposed misogyny and internalized self-hatred that they in turn direct toward other women.

Feminist Acts of Reading

In recent decades, revisionist feminist scholarship has successfully retrieved the subjugated voices of women in Japan and elsewhere. Some women, however, remain largely outside the sphere of feminist research interest. This chapter examines the writing of two women, Sono Ayako (1931– ) and Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–1984), who for very different reasons have been largely excluded from revisionist feminist scholarship. The chapter argues that the narratives of both women can provide valuable insights into the lived experiences of women in postwar Japan. A case is made, notwithstanding Sono’s notorious ultra-nationalist stance on a range of social issues, for a feminist reading of selected works by this writer. Insights are provided into the manner in which even feminist scholars can inadvertently replicate the hegemonic attitudes of the male critics who failed to recognize the value of Ariyoshi Sawako’s work. From the size of her corpus alone, the latter writer deserves serious feminist attention.

Seeing Double

Popular magazine illustrator Takabatake Kashō (1888–1966) was influential in creating images of young women that filled a variety of magazines in the Taishō (1912–1926) and early Shōwa (1926–1989) periods. They are depicted as stylish and self-assured, sexy but not objectified. This chapter argues that Kashō’s work is feminist for two reasons. His female subjects, oftentimes “modern girls,” rebuff the norms of so-called traditional feminine behavior, while his male subjects display so-called feminine behavior through gesture, appearance, etc. Through the hermaphroditic portrayal of his subjects, Kashō challenges the overdetermined link between gender and the body. Secondly, Kashō portrays women as autonomous, in contrast to state ideology that defined women through their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. Kashō’s collapsing of naturalized divisions between the sexes, as well as his female subjects’ behavior, mark his work as feminist.

Coeducation in the Age of “Good Wife, Wise Mother”

Although postwar conservatives argued that coeducation was “forced” on Japanese people as part of Occupation-era reforms, in fact a number of progressive Japanese educators began advocating for coeducation in the early twentieth century. This chapter analyzes the work of one such prominent educator, Koizumi Ikuko (1892–1964), whose seminal book Danjo kyōgakuron (On coeducation, 1931) forwarded a compelling argument for coeducation at a time when the Japanese government sought to reinforce gender differences through sex-segregated education. Koizumi’s advocacy of coeducation was underwritten by a presumption of equality between the sexes that was radical for its time, and remarkable for its anticipation of Occupation-era debates on gender and education that transformed the postwar discursive landscape. Understanding Koizumi’s theories about sexual equality thus helps us to re-think histories of Japanese women during the 1930s that characterize them as compliant with the contemporary “good wife and wise mother” ideology of women’s roles.

Women’s Rights as Proletarian Rights

Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980) is famous for having worked relentlessly to critique Japan’s prewar socialist movement for its lack of attention to women’s issues. In addition to her continual presence as an oppositional figure operating simultaneously at the margins and the center of Japanese socialist political and organizational activities, she also offered similarly relentless critiques of what she considered “bourgeois” women’s groups and their pursuit of liberal political rights like suffrage that would benefit primarily elite women. She was highly ambivalent during the prewar period regarding the importance of advocating for women’s suffrage. But with the end of the war, and thus the end of the authoritarian and militarist state against which she had fought her entire adult life, Yamakawa could embrace the cause and the reality of suffrage without hesitation. This marked not a radical shift, but a continuation of her commitment to democratic and anti-authoritarian principles.

Toward Postcolonial Feminist Subjectivity

The issue of “comfort women” urged a self-revision of Japanese women’s movements in the 1990s from “victim” to “assailant,” from monolith to multiplicity, revealing a legacy of colonialism and racism within Japanese feminism. A group of women of Korean origin played a significant role in advancing the redress movement in Japan. Korean Women’s Network on the Comfort Women Issue (JŪgun Ianfu Mondai Uri Yoson Nettowāku) emerged as the first grassroots movement that drew attention to multiple forms of oppression and the specific identity and positioning of Korean women in Japan. Through this movement, Yeoseong Network criticized their marginalization and invisibility in Japanese society as well as the sexism in the ethnic Korean community. Bridging women’s movements in Japan and Korea, it broke ground for transnational feminist solidarity in East Asia. This chapter explores the complexity of liberation for ethnic minority women.