Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II: Japanese Women in the Interwar Transnational Feminist Movement

Notes

Notes introduction 1. This quotation is cited and translated in Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from “Seitō,” 1911–16 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 94. In Japanese mythology, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu (Ama-terasu ô mi kami) was supreme among numerous gods. This indicates that as in other ancient civilizations, including Greece and Egypt, Japanese people worshipped woman and regarded her as an independent agent. However, under the patriarchal sociofamilial structure in modern civilization, man exerted power over woman, and woman was subordinated and lost her independence. In the 1910s, not only in Japan but also in Europe and America, women like Hiratsuka were struggling to challenge and redefine gender roles. She wrote this as part of a manifesto inaugurating a women’s literal journal, Seitō, which carried both Western and Japanese writings and served as a forum for readers to discuss women’s issues. As Bardsley points out, the cover of the journal illustrated a royal woman of Greece or Egypt (2). Thus, Hiratsuka linked women’s causes in Japan with those in the rest of world, indicating that Seitôsha members were New Women and therefore part of what Bardsley called “an international phenomenon” (14). See also Tomida Hiroko, Hiratsuka Raichô and Early Japanese Feminism (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004). 2. Throughout this book, Japanese names are written in accordance with the Japanese practice of giving the surname first and the given name second. Japanese women often applied a suffix, “ko,” indicating a woman, to their given names. Similarly, Gauntlett Tsune used both Tsune and Tsuneko, and Inoue Hideko also used Hide. 3. The cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall, in “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart 148 notes to the introduction Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), notes that the terms “West” and “western” have “no simple or single meaning ” (185) and that “the West” is a discourse that divides the world into “the West and the Rest.” In this book, I follow Hall’s approach: “the West” was “central to the Enlightenment” (187) and “did first emerge in Western Europe” (185), and the United States belongs to the West (185). The discourse of the West assumed by Western society “was the most advanced type of society on earth” (187). For the history of modern Japan, see Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (London: Belknap Press, 2000), and Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For the history of feminism in Japan, see Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Empowerment and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983); and Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 4. Leila J. Rupp, “Constructing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888–1945,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1571–1600. See also Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 5. Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Tem­ perance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 6. Yasutake Rumi, Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004). Anglo-American missionaries visited Japan and promoted women’s education, which paved the way for the organization of the Tokyo WCTU (Tokyo Fujin Kyôfûkai) in 1886. The Tokyo WCTU developed into the Japanese WCTU in 1893. 7. Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire, 5. See also Kubushiro Ochimi, “Taishô ju-ichi-nen no taikaki o mukaen to shite” [General Conference in 1922 begins ], Fujin Shinpô [Woman’s Herald], no. 293 (February 1922): 2. 8. Yasutake, Transnational Women’s Activism, 102; Tyrrell, Woman’s World/ Woman’s Empire, 4–5. Yasutake points out the collaboration of “Americanization” between American and Japanese unions. Tyrrell sketches the complex nature of union activism. Sakamoto Kiyone’s research about Miyakawa Shidzue, a colleague of Gauntlett Tsune, points out members of the Youth Department of the JWCTU, most of whom were educated in missionary schools, who absorbed the ideals of social reform and women’s rights based on...