East is West and West is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America

4. Envisioning Feminism across the Pacific: Japanese and American Feminism and the Limits of Race in Facing Two Ways

4 / Envisioning Feminism across the Pacific: Japanese and American Feminism and the Limits of Race in Facing Two Ways Transpacific co-encounters between Japanese and US feminists, specifically through the collaboration and alliance between two birth control activists, Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto and Margaret Sanger, are examined in this chapter. As I suggested in the introduction and in chapter 1, there are relatively few works that discuss the real and imagined relationships between Asian and white women during this period, and even fewer looking at comparative feminisms at this time. While I do not propose that the example of Ishimoto and Sanger constitutes “the” model of comparative feminisms during this period or that it predicts future models, this early transpacific feminist collaboration provided specific benefits to each woman that placed their feminisms within a more global and international frame. For Sanger, her friendship and collaboration with Ishimoto gave her the opportunity to expand her work in Japan, while for Ishimoto, Sanger’s specific form of birth control activism, which focused on good mothering and the well-being of women, inspired Ishimoto to develop a similar activist agenda in Japan. Similar to the ways notions of gender and sexuality were changing in the United States during the 1910s, 1920s, and1930s, 140 / envisioning feminism across the pacific Japan’s Taishô era exhibited shifts in notions of gender and sexuality within a liberalizing political and social climate. The popular cultural representations of the modern boy, the mobo, and the modern girl, the moga, in Japan corresponded respectively to the new man and the new woman of Europe and the United States. These conditions became a unique platform for Sanger and Ishimoto’s feminist collaborations, and yet they differentiate the two women’s views on race, class, women, culture, and nation. The influence of US feminisms broadened Ishimoto ’s feminist ideologies, which were more critical of nationalism and imperialism and even included a cognizance of the racial and cultural oppressions of both the United States and Japan. In contrast, Sanger’s feminism belies racialized perspectives about race, nation, and culture. Japanese feminist and birth control activist Baroness Ishimoto Shidzué’s collaborations with American feminists, and her exposure to European and US socialist and feminist thought, motivated her to cultivate a feminist identity and philosophy that encouraged the potential for imagining a feminism between the United States and Japan, supported by an expansive vision of feminism and humanism across national, cultural, and racial boundaries. Ishimoto’s only English-language autobiography , Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935), was written primarily for an American audience and was about her life growing up during Japan’s nascent modernization. Her autobiography is of interest not only because of its depiction of a life few Americans knew about but also because of its vision of a more capacious feminist imaginary. Ishimoto’s work is evidence that the influence of the West, and the United States in particular , resulted in not necessarily a Japanese feminism created in the image of white Western feminism but rather a vision that was less bounded by nation or culture in any absolute fashion. How the West became imagined, understood, and integrated into Japanese socialist and feminist thought, as evidenced in Ishimoto’s writings, demonstrated a feminism that transcended national, cultural, and racial boundaries. envisioning feminism across the pacific / 141 As an alternative Japanese female literary text, Ishimoto’s autobiography appealed to female readers in the United States who themselves were trying to envision the New American Woman. However, despite the possibilities offered by Ishimoto’s autobiography, especially in terms of new female identities, US readers seemed unable to look beyond their own Western orientalist gaze, often focusing their attention on the differences between East and West, Japan and the United States, and even Asians and whites. By the time Ishimoto published Facing Two Ways, there was already in the United States a fairly well-established tradition of reading about Japan: readers were thus familiar with certain representations of the Japanese woman, some of which were set within stock orientalist discourse. Interestingly, the rise and popularity of “Japanese” literary heroines such as Madame Chrysanthemum and Madame Butterfly occurred alongside the birth of the New American Woman. Thus images of these Japanese heroines worked in complex ways for American women. The latter could imagine the struggles shared by women on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Reading about Japanese women’s struggles to...