Hiratsuka Raicho and Early Japanese Feminism (review)

Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971) was best known for her daring challenges to male-defined social norms in Japan, especially in the 1910s and 1920s. Rather than focusing on a certain aspect of her activities or ideas, Hiroko Tomida's book presents a comprehensive look at Hiratsuka's life encompassing the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods based on extensive sources, which include literary fictions, by and about Hiratsuka.

After explaining the objectives, sources, and methodology in the introduction, Tomida describes how Meiji reforms detrimentally affected women's status and summarizes the "pre-Hiratsuka" women's movement in chapter one. The author then turns to Hiratsuka's early life as a well-educated daughter of an upper-middle class family (chapter two) and her notorious suicide attempt with a married writer in 1918 (chapter three) in order to trace the origins of Hiratsuka's feminist radicalism. Much of the book is devoted to examining the literary society Seitō (Blue Stocking), founded by Hiratsuka in 1911 as a forum of "new women" (chapter four), the 1916–19 motherhood protection debate (chapter five), and Hiratsuka's role in the parliamentary campaigns led by the Association of New Women (1919–21) (chapter six). The association pursued the amendment of Article Five of the Peace Police Law, which was accomplished in 1922 and paved the way for the subsequent female suffrage movement, and the enactment of a law restricting marriage by men with venereal disease, which failed. The conclusion is preceded by chapter seven, which briefly discusses Hiratsuka's involvement in the consumer, birth-control, and proletarian women's arts movements in the 1930s, her refusal to support the militaristic state during the Pacific War, and her participation in the postwar peace movement.

Tomida launched her research for her dissertation (Sheffield University, 2001), on which this book is based, under frustrating conditions. She was able to locate but unable to secure access to unpublished primary materials, especially Hiratsuka's post-1945 private correspondence (pp. 6–7, 20–21). As a result, Tomida's portrayal of Hiratsuka and emphasis on her Taisho-era activism is mostly familiar to those who have already read key Japanese sources, including biographies and document collections.¹

However, Tomida differentiates her work from other studies by richly describing the interplay between Hiratsuka and other early feminists, including Ichikawa Fusae, Katō Shidzue, Kamichika Ichiko, Yamada Waka, Itō Noe, Yamanouchi Mina, Oku Mumeo, and Yamakawa Kikue (pp. 4, 366). Though less contextualized than her discussion on Japanese feminists, Tomida inserts information on preceding or parallel feminist debates and activism in the West (mostly Britain). The author then compares and contrasts these Japanese and Western feminists to grasp Hiratsuka's accomplishments and limitations in the history of the Japanese women's movement. This approach has resulted in a less heroic and more complex image of Hiratsuka (p. 17). For example, chapter seven ably shows how Hiratsuka simultaneously disapproved of capitalism and socialism by promoting mutual support organizations such as consumer cooperatives in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Hiratsuka's interests in proletarian groups effectively question the generally accepted and oversimplified portrayal of Hiratsuka as a bourgeois feminist (pp. 336–47).

In spite of its merits, this study could have approached the subject differently. I would like to concentrate on two points: the definition of "feminism" and the question of memory. First, I believe the term "feminism," the only concept she employs for analysis, should be better defined and more rigorously analyzed. Tomida presents her view of feminism at the outset of the book:

After the end of the Meiji era, particularly during the Taishō period, female organizations were established to support women's education, wider female employment, legal reform affecting marriage, divorce, and child custody, women's health, birth control, suffrage and the like. . . .Like other Japanese feminists, Hiratsuka Raichō applied her convictions to such varied problems.

(p. 1)

In chapter one, Tomida carefully avoids applying the term "feminist" to women educators such as Tsuda Umeko and Yoshioka Yayoi; to...