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Portents and Politics: Two Women Activists on the Verge of the Meiji Restoration
- The Journal of Japanese Studies
- Society for Japanese Studies
- Volume 38, Number 1, Winter 2012
- pp. 1-23
- 10.1353/jjs.2012.0024
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay examines the deployment of revelations and prophetic dreams in the writings of two female political activists of the bakumatsu period, Kurosawa Tokiko and Nomura Bōtō. As a rhetorical device, the supernatural enabled Kurosawa and Nomura to foster their affiliation with the loyalists, to envision order, and to justify their actions. As a weapon and as a shield, it offered a sense of entitlement and the illusion of invulnerability. Studies of bakumatsu ideology often emphasize its rational qualities; these two case studies, however, shed new light on the multifaceted expressions of political activism on the verge of the Meiji Restoration.