Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley (review)

In this insightful book, Jan Bardsley illuminates how gender roles and postwar democracy were constructed and debated in Japanese popular discourse. Rather than giving an overview, she highlights carefully selected impressionistic examples which show the high diversity of key areas. While the book is entitled Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan, the author’s main focus is on housewives in the 1950s. This particular decade marks the outset of postwar Japan—“a new era in Japanese history” (p. 5), even a Japan that is “radically reborn” (p. 4). It was a crucial time in Japan, with a modern social life developing against the backdrop of recovery after the World War II defeat and the implementation of the new constitution and civil rights.

The 1950s were paramount in elevating the role of housewife, and thus Bardsley points to new “gender roles at a time when they could take several paths, but became naturalized in the housewife-salaryman model” (p. 5). How the housewife was constructed as a postwar, modern, and progressive female role model and as such intertwined with the general reorganization of Japanese society in media discourses is Bardsley’s main theme: “the idea of progress among Japanese women took a number of forms in the 1950s that were hotly contested in the framework of democratization, the march to prosperity, and the Cold War” (p. 19). Bardsley shows how women in general and the housewife in particular were seen as “reflections of change” and types “never seen before” (p. 4) that were to contribute to renewing the country. These issues of postwar Japan, democracy, and the role of housewives, however, were closely entangled with the cold war, and thus “[e]xploring the intersections between American and Japanese housewives and the home as a Cold War ‘contact zone’” (p. 2) is another theme in this work.

Bardsley organizes her book as “a chronology of controversies” (p. 2) by focusing on selected debates and discourses found in articles in newspapers and women’s magazines published between 1949 and 1959. Her textual analysis of various sources puts a certain focus on the magazine Fujin kōron (Ladies review) and “newspaper sections favored by women” (p. 2). By complementing narratives on housewives with discussion of events in relation to outstanding female figures such as the royal bride Shōda Michiko and the beauty queen Kojima Akiko, Bardsley draws on various perspectives to illuminate the main thread of her argument, which enables her to portray vividly the great diversity of domestic female gender roles and how they were constructed and intertwined with perceptions of the postwar and democracy in 1950s Japan.

The book is divided into seven chapters. In the introduction, Bardsley outlines the main ideas and organization of the book and maps out the changing lifestyle of postwar Japanese housewives. She also considers the role of U.S. housewives in occupied Japan as “representative[s] of American democracy” (p. 10) and how U.S. housewives were reflected in Japanese discourses “serving alternately as a beacon of hope and a cautionary tale” (p. 11). Bardsley extends her perspective to the twenty-first century by showing that the topics of her book are still relevant today. Beginning in chapter 2 with a 1949–50 controversy in the Nippon Times as the first specific example of her study, Bardsley illustrates how the qualities of the housewife could be seen to convey democratic values and to convince through etiquette and intellect against the backdrop of questioning these same qualifications in the case of U.S. occupier housewives. Thus, as the author carefully carves out with a detailed description of related essays, the “[r]elations of occupier and occupied” (p. 43) were challenged by comparing Japanese and U.S. housewives. As Bardsley argues, ultimately the controversy ended with “a lesson in manners for the Japanese and the reinforcement of the American woman’s democratizing mission” (p. 22).

The role...