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335 15 Visions of Women and the New Society in Conflict: Yamakawa Kikue versus Takamure Itsue E. PATRICIA TSURUMI By the end of World War I, the Japanese left wing included individuals with a wide range of viewpoints. But by 1921 most of them had lined up on one side or the other of the fledgling labor movement’s famous ana-boru (anarchism vs. Bolshevism) debate between champions of anarcho-syndicalism and advocates of Marxian socialism. Like so much of “Taishò democracy ,” the mainstream of the ana-boru controversy regarding the postrevolutionary society leftists hoped to build defined human needs in terms of society’s male members. In a parallel discourse a few years later, female anarchists and socialists argued about the kind of postrevolutionary society women needed (Ogata 1980). Participants in the feminists’ version of the ana-boru fight deplored the social construction known as “woman” in the Japan of their day and sought to construct “woman” for a postrevolutionary Japan that would embrace gender equality. But their constructions of the new woman and the new society were radically different. Despite some crossover between anarchist and socialist camps, anarchist feminists generally espoused gynocentric or woman-centered feminism while socialist feminists adhered to a version of humanist feminism.1 This essay is about the most famous segment of the women’s ana-boru conflict: the dispute between humanist feminist Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980) on the Marxian socialist side and gynocentrist Takamure Itsue (1894–1964) in the anarchist camp. It occurred mainly during 1928. Since I am interested in their ideas as articulations of the two major streams of left-wing feminism during the Taishò era rather than as representations of ana and boru positions of the time, a major aim of this essay is to shed light on the constructedness of “woman” and of “postrevolutionary Japan” in the debate. Absorbed and refined by later writers and activists, their arguments became central parts of the inheritance of all future generations of Japanese feminist theorists, including those active in Japan today. The essay first investigates notions of “woman” and “postrevolutionary society” offered by Yamakawa and Takamure before 1928. In Yamakawa’s case these appeared in her contributions to the “motherhood protection” debate of 1918–1919 in which she confronted bourgeois feminists Hiratsuka Raichò (1886–1971), Yamada Waka (1879–1957), and Yosano Akiko (1878–1942). In Takamure’s case these were laid out at length in this poet’s first published prose work on women, The Genesis of Love (Ren’ai no sòsei) in 1926. The essay then examines the animosity-laden exchange between Yamakawa and Takamure in 1928 that appeared as articles in a number of women’s periodicals. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the meaning of the debate for later generations of Japanese feminists and the global significance of the ideas of Takamure and Yamakawa today. YOUNG KIKUE AND HER CONCEPT OF “WOMAN” IN THE 1918–1919 MOTHERHOOD DEBATE Born and reared in Tokyo, both before and after her graduation from Tsuda College (Josei Eigaku Juku) in 1912, the young woman then named Aoyama Kikue got her “real education” reading socialist and anarchist writings, attending public lectures, and talking to activists. A serious student of ideas, she often read the works of Western theorists in the original languages. At the end of 1916 she married Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880–1958), a prison-seasoned Marxist theorist widely respected in left-wing circles.2 Exchanges in print regarding motherhood protection had been going on since 1915, but they were savagely hostile by the time Yamakawa Kikue jumped into the fray with “Women’s Opinion that Stabs Women in the Back” (Fujin o uragiru fujin ron) in the August 1918 issue of New Japan (Shin Nihon). This article was aimed squarely at Yamada Waka, who had recently published “A Discourse on Women’s Problems from Now On” (Kongo no fujin mondai o teishò su).3 A former prostitute turned Christian educator, Yamada Waka was the most conservative of the three prominent bourgeois feminists in the motherhood debate; she supported the “good wife and wise mother” ideology of the Japanese state, maintaining that the roles of women and men were equal but different. Kikue scornfully denounced Waka for her “exaggeration of biological differences between the sexes” (Yamakawa 1918a, 156). Waka’s claim that women should devote themselves to their families while men worked outside of their homes, noted Kikue, was an 336 TSURUMI [3.144.189.177] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

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