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44 2 Kawahara Misako Daughter, Teacher, Good Wife, Wise Mother, and Spy The New Woman will advance beyond the point where so many other women have stopped and, as a pioneer, will dare to tread an entirely new road. —Itō Noe1 Miyazaki Tōten was the quintessential man displaced from his proper time—an ambitious youth who was born too late for the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement and too far away from the site of revolution, China, to have made a significant impact. The figure discussed in this chapter, Kawahara Misako,2 sometimes referred to by her married name, Ichinomiya Misako (1875–1945), seems to have been the exact opposite of Miyazaki.3 A contemporary of Miyazaki, through fortuitous circumstances and her own indomitable will Kawahara achieved something that no Japanese (man or woman) before her had. Her career exemplifies the ideal of the “New Woman,” independent and careerminded , though her vision and actions went beyond the quest for sexual liberation and women’s rights within Japan’s own borders. Her role in promoting education and the importance of the place of women in Asia made her a pioneer in cross-regional cultural contact. At the same time, she pursued the civilizing mission for what was then a newly emerging empire with zeal and passion. An examination of Kawahara’s life provides us with a glimpse of women’s lives in the transitional period from feudal society to the modern era, when education brought new hopes and possibilities for women. Kawahara’s travels, befitting a Victorian woman on her Grand Tour, took her to China and beyond.4 The trip provided her with a rare opportunity to see the world outside Japan firsthand. Her sense of compassion for the local people and her remarkable achievements in bringing new knowledge to the far-flung areas of the Asiatic continent define her as a woman considerably ahead of her time. Her chosen path for the second half of her life, settling into the traditional role of “good wife, wise mother,” also demonstrates the limitations of the early feminist theory regarding liberation in Japan. Kawahara Misako | 45 Kawahara’s mission to Mongolia was twofold: first, to promote women ’s education in China and Mongolia and to serve as an educational consultant to the Mongolian court; and second—and more controversially —to aid in the intelligence work needed in preparation for the Russo–Japanese War. Because of this latter mission, she is often referred to as “Japan’s first female spy” or the “Mata Hari of Japan.” But who was Kawahara Misako? Was she someone who aided the expansion of the nationalist agenda of the Japanese empire, or was she a pioneer who helped spread a new feminist progressiveness to other parts of Asia? How do these two seemingly contradictory sentiments jive with one another? How do we align Kawahara’s contradictory public persona and her private self? In this chapter I first locate Kawahara in the sociohistorical landscape of the mid-Meiji period, focusing on two conceptual idioms: “good wife, wise mother” and “New Woman,” two terms that have been studied thoroughly within the Japanese context but have rarely been examined in a cross-cultural, transregional setting. In a sense, the two conflicting terms have come to symbolize the two constructions of the feminine that, together, bookended the Meiji period. To understand the story of Kawahara, it is essential to understand the simultaneously conflicting and complementary correlations between the two. This chapter further examines Kawahara’s various endeavors in China and Mongolia—both her contributions to female education and the spying that she supposedly performed on Japan’s behalf. I ask: Based on her own account, what did she do and what did she see? What makes Kawahara ’s writing stand out in comparison with accounts written by others at the same time? What were some of her concerns? Did gender play a role in how she viewed the “other”? I also explore the various discourses about her, revived at different historical junctures to fulfill the needs of particular audiences by nationalist-leaning writers such as Yasuda Yojūrō. The discrepancy between the public perception and the private life of Kawahara is considered, along with the implications of the role she played in defining womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century in East Asia. Women at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century The story of Kawahara Misako can only be fully understood within the larger sociohistorical context of the early...

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