Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley (review)

This well-written and timely book comes at a moment in history when U.S.-Japan relations, Japan’s postwar democracy, and Japan’s role in the world are at a new stage of social and political contestation, within and beyond Japan. Jan Bardsley provides a fascinating view of cultural politics of the 1950s that shaped the value system and the social order of postwar Japan as well as powerful discourses of national identity. Her analyses of representations of women and, in particular, the postwar ideal of the Japanese housewife, highlight the centrality of gender in these discursive processes.

Bardsley focuses on the 1950s as a juncture “when [gender roles] could take several paths, but became naturalized in the housewife-salaryman model” (p. 5). She approaches the housewife (shufu) as a postwar icon of Japanese modernity connoting democratic progress and economic recovery, on the one hand, and modern domesticity, on the other. The housewife is, thus, comparable to earlier and similarly controversial constructs of femininity, such as the girl student (jogakusei), the new woman (atarashii onna), and the modern girl (modan gāru, or moga). In other words, the postwar housewife was, in her time, the latest in a series of female icons at the center of twentieth-century discourses of Japaneseness. The book, as its title suggests, understands 1950s representations of the housewife to be inseparably intertwined with discourses and power structures pertaining to the Cold War. Indeed, Cold War economic and cultural politics continued to hold up the ideal of the modern, emancipated, and sexually attractive American housewife even after the end of Japan’s Allied Occupation (1952), and while Japanese women were exhorted to emulate this model, Japanese men were denounced as a hindrance to women’s emancipation. The author traces the processes and products of such transnational gender politics in a range of sources—texts of various genres from women’s magazines, newspaper reportage, and visual images including photographs and cartoons. Her textual analysis “recreat[es] the theater” of five major disputes, or issues, she singles out from these sources and reconstructs the images and meanings that were attached to the housewife in these controversies (p. 5). While Bardsley thus treats the housewife in the abstract, as a discursive phenomenon, her narrative also features flesh-and-blood housewives—most of whom identify themselves as such. These women inhabit the “contact zone” (discussed below) of 1950s Japan and participate in negotiations of “competing domesticities” (p. 2) as actors and/or objects in the debate.

The introduction (chapter 1) begins with a short look at a 1959 Time magazine feature article on the emancipation of Japanese women, thus highlighting the transnational character of the book’s research subject and approach. As told in the magazine, this process of emancipation—which culminated in the wedding of Crown Princess (and now Empress) Michiko, the first commoner to marry into the royal family—owed its success to the American-led Occupation of Japan. Bardsley then takes up the social and political reality of housewives both in Japan and the United States and introduces the reader to the Cold War rhetoric of American domesticity as well as to a view of early postwar Japan through the lens of Marie Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” (p. 11). The final part of the introduction argues for the current relevance of Bardsley’s research by pointing out the persistence of competing narratives that evolved or gained prominence in the late 1950s. Among these are the notion of Japanese women being in need of foreign rescue from oppressive Japanese men; the idea of the Japanese housewife as a symbol and guarantor of public order and national identity by virtue of her very domesticity; and, not least, images of royal women and beauty queens as personifications of these contradictory concepts of femininity. Following the introduction, chapters 2 through 6 provide in-depth analyses of single issues that each...