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Parts of this chapter were previously published in Taeko Shibahara, “‘The Private League of Nations’: The Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference and Japanese Feminists in 1928,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 41 (2011): 3–24; Taeko Shibahara, “Through Americanized Japanese Woman’s Eyes: Tsuda Umeko and the Women’s Movement in Japan in the 1910s,” Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 1, no. 2 (May 2010): 225–234; and Taeko Shibahara, “‘Not Only for the Welfare of the Nation but for the World and Humanity’: The Interwar Suffrage Movement in Japan,” Journal of Women’s History 24, no.2 (Summer 2012): 62–68. Copyright © 2012 Journal of Women’s History. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. 2 “Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook” The Development of Cross-cultural Contacts, 1902–1930 Others may theorise about the woman movement, but to us has been vouchsafed positive knowledge. Once, this movement represented the scattered and disconnected protests of individual women. In that period women as a whole were blinded by ignorance, because society denied them education; they were compelled to silence, for society forbade them to speak. They struggled against their wrongs singly and alone, for society forbade them to organize; they dwelt in poverty, for the law denied them the control of property, and even the collection of wages. . . . [T]here has emerged a present-day movement possessing a clear understanding and a definite, positive purpose. Carrie Chapman Catt, “Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?” T his chapter deals with the development of feminist consciousness among Japanese women up to 1930 and how ideas from and cooperation with Western feminists were vital for the development of the wider organized women’s movement in Japan. Before exploring the major themes in exchanges over this period, it is useful to look at how one woman saw the situation for Japanese women in 1920. In June 1920, Jus Suffragii (International Woman Suffrage News), the journal of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, carried an article based “Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook” 23 on an interview with Miss Shidachi, a Japanese student at the University of London. When the interviewer questioned her about “the exact position of women in a country [Japan] where as yet they have no political existence,” Shidachi pointed out that “the whole idea of citizen rights for women was still in its infancy.” She explained that, despite its Westernizing policies, the government continued to maintain feudal patriarchal customs. Not only did workers not have the right to unite and most people not have the right to vote, but the government also maintained an education policy for women aimed at creating “good wives and wise mothers.” The influence of this policy and slogan were so strong that “even in the Christian schools the Government motto finds favor,” encouraging women to regard themselves as “not full human beings” but as “beings created for the service of man.” The result of this misogynist education policy was that as “women grow out of childhood they marry husbands they have probably never seen, or they enter a sweat industry and toil as wage slaves.” Consequently, for Shidachi, Japanese women were “perhaps, of all women, the most miserable.”1 Shidachi’s intense sentiment expressed with painful precision the discrepancy between the political visibility of British women and the lack of it for Japanese women. British women had achieved limited suffrage in 1918 after struggling fiercely for it since the late nineteenth century. At the time of Shidachi’s interview in 1920, experiencing social chaos in the aftermath of World War I, Western feminists (including British ones) were concerned about how to use women’s political power to promote their socioeconomic rights, and how to create a representative body of women in the League of Nations.2 Their efforts were based on the desire to establish a fair and peaceful society.3 After her galvanizing encounter with British feminists, Shidachi was determined to “return to her own country, carrying with her new ideals and a new outlook, and interpreting these new ideals to her country.”4 Shidachi was one of dozens of middle-class Japanese women with crosscultural contacts who developed critical insights into the double standards of Japan’s modern patriarchy. Women’s activism in Japan, which had begun in the late nineteenth century, was not dormant until 1920. However, these later cross-cultural contacts helped Japanese feminists decide to develop the women’s rights movement in Japan by applying...

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