Traditionen idealisierter Weiblichkeit: Die "Kostbare Sammlung von Vorbildern weiblicher Weisheit" (Joyō chie kagami takaraori) als Paradebeispiel edo-zeitlicher Frauenbildung (review)

This year, the Sōgō Joseishi Kenkyūkai (Society for Research on Women's History) celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, and it does so with the publication of Jidai o ikita onna tachi (Women Living through History).¹ An introductory reader of sources bearing on women's history in Japan, the work joins the already wide variety of materials published by the group, from which many of us have profited in the past decades. But even after thirty years, when the study of women in Japanese history is no longer anything remarkable (recent textbooks certainly include the word "women" more frequently than those of two generations ago), there are still many issues to address and topics to revisit. One topic that calls for exploration is the education of women.

The book under review is a welcome contribution to the study of women's education in the Tokugawa period. Stephan Köhn's Traditionen idealisierter Weiblichkeit (which might be translated as "Traditions of Idealized Femininity") is the first full German translation of Joyō chie kagami takaraori, a handbook that was meant to educate and inform young women. After a short introduction, including some brief bibliographical information about the text, Köhn presents in chapter 2 the broader cultural-historical context of women's education and didactic texts as a means of addressing the function of such texts and the way in which women used them. Chapter 3 contains the translation, which occupies about 250 pages and is enhanced by an accompanying CD with files containing facsimiles of the original work, along with a transcription in modern print. In chapter 4 the author takes up some themes that are of interest to him, and the book ends with a short summary.

One might say that in Köhn's book women appear as objects in two senses. First, the original text—Joyō chie kagami takaraori—was most likely written by men for women: The female subject is not given any voice; rather, she is to be instructed in—as Köhn describes it in his title—"idealized femininity." Second, Köhn does not deal with women's experiences with this kind of text, but by analyzing the content of Joyō chie kagami takaraori, which he translates as "Precious Collection of Examples of Female Wisdom," remains in the abstract realm of the written word. His selective analyses of the text are too brief for a reviewer to discuss. Since this is the first translation of a work of this kind, however (Onna daigaku [Women's Greater Learning], which is available in several translations, is only one part of a larger compilation of the same sort), I hope a consideration of some of the issues it raises will encourage others to engage in a serious investigation of educational texts.

The topic is important within not only women's history, but also print and publishing history, because questions such as how to categorize this kind of text, who the authors and readers were, and how the texts were read (aloud, alone, often . . .), as well as what constitutes education and cultivation in a broader context, still await discussion.² Köhn's book helps to clarify the parameters of some of these issues.

Köhn identifies the author, or perhaps better, the compiler, of Joyō chie kagami takaraori as the Osaka publisher Kashiwaraya Seiemon (?-?).³ Seiemon's publishing house, which focused primarily on nonfiction, was one of the largest in Osaka. In 1769 Seiemon recycled, rearranged, and expanded Joyō chie kagami, an older text his publishing house had put out previously, to create Joyō chie kagami takaraori. This work has 123 double leaves, and most of its pages are divided into three registers—upper, middle, and lower—allowing the reader either to browse in a manner similar to reading the newspaper or to read only one register in its...