Under the Shadow of Nationalism: Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women

1. Introduction: Japanese Nationalism and Rural Women

1 Those who would codify the meanings of words fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history.—(Scott 1988, 28) hile acknowledging that every word inscribed in the present text has a history of its own, I intend to focus on only a few. I single out for study “Japanese nation/nationalism,” “rural,” and “women” because I am interested in the way in which the category of “rural women” emerged in the discourse of “Japanese nationalism” at the turn of the century and continues to be used to maintain national boundaries to the present. However, I do not believe that “rural women” is the product of discourse alone. Nondiscursive practices, such as institutional and pedagogic ones, have played important roles in creating “rural women” and making them useful subjects for the construction of the Japanese nation-state (see Das 1995, 11). For this reason, I shift my focus back and forth between the discursive and sociological categories of rural women. The latter comprises a group of women who have lived in rural Nagano, a mountainous prefecture in central Japan. This sociological category is my own imposition. Although they live in what I perceive to be “rural” areas in Nagano, they do not necessarily identify themselves as rural women. They are individuals who have their own thoughts and emotions, and who joined various women’s groups in the 1970s and 1980s to reminisce on their own pasts. They are neither identical nor diametrically opposed to the disChapter 1 Introduction: Japanese Nationalism and Rural Women w cursively formulated “rural women.” In this book I explore the gap between the two categories. Historian Joan Scott reminds us that even the word “history” has its own history. Hence, history does not exclusively record changes in the past; history also actively participates in producing knowledge about the past (1988, 2). I would like to produce a different history of rural women in Japan that eschews the way in which they are described, depicted, analyzed, and judged in the discourse of Japanese nationalism. This objective requires that I rely on the “voices” of rural women themselves.1 In this chapter, I introduce the rural women in Nagano with their own names and voices. I then introduce the discursive category of “rural women,” which eventually comes to stand for “Japanese women” in the early twentieth century. I focus separately on “Japanese nation/nationalism,” “women,” and “rural” in that order, offering a theoretical overview of each concept. RURAL WOMEN AS SOCIOLOGICAL CATEGORY The rural women whom I met and whose voices I heard both in person and in documents come from a particular region, Nagano prefecture in central Japan. My choice of Nagano was based on my own judgment of this region’s relevance to the formation of the nation-state: the contribution of the rural women of Nagano in building modern Japan is undeniable. These women were born or have lived in various villages and towns near Okaya in Nagano. Okaya, often described as the “capital of the Japanese silk kingdom,” was the center of the silk spinning industry during the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 Yet their contribution was not restricted to this particular, though perhaps most important, industry and historical period. Rural women in Nagano worked, from a very young age, as nursemaids (komori), domestic servants, factory workers, and farming women. In whatever capacity they worked, they became the objects of scrutiny in various genres of nationalist discourse not only because of the importance of their labor to the nation, but also because of their gender and place of residence (that necessarily connoted their class position). 2 Introduction Introduction 3 I chose Nagano for both historical and contemporary reasons. Since the early 1970s, a significant number of women’s groups have been formed throughout the prefecture. At regular meetings, members made deliberate efforts to record their recollections. They gathered at a cultural center (kòmin-kan), a public institution that oversees cultural affairs in each administrative unit, or in their friends’ and neighbors’ homes to talk about their memories.3 I did not solicit these women to narrate their memories to me. If I had, I would have been the only one to listen to their narratives. Instead, they voluntarily gathered, formed groups among themselves, and talked, each one listening to the voices of the others...