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Epilogue: Postwar Continuity I t may be tempting to see the end of World War II and the occupation of Japan as marking a dividing line in the history of feminism in Japan, as if what followed was not part of a continuity of women’s efforts to achieve equality, and as if women’s agency in Japan began only after it was “parachuted in” in 1945. For the Japanese feminists in this study, that was far from the case. Despite the inevitable imbalance of power entailed by occupation , once suffrage was achieved they saw that they could return to their overriding core concerns: peace and equality. When members of the GHQ/SCAP developed programs for the democratization of Japan that included policies aimed at “the liberation of Japanese women” in 1945, a group of American and Japanese women worked together to facilitate and support this. One member of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), Lt. Ethel Weed (1906–1975), was assigned to the Women’s Information Office of the Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) at GHQ/SCAP and took charge of the development of programs to democratize Japan by raising the status of Japanese women in the political, social, and educational fields during the occupation period.3 It [Woman as Force in History] refutes the dogma that women have been a subject sex as feminists have interpreted long history; and the stories of Japanese women in long history, such as Shidzue Ishimoto Kato assembled, bear me out.1 Letter from Mary Ritter Beard to Ethel Weed, February 8, 1946 When we face the cold reality that the world is divided and think of Japan’s peculiar position in the midst of this division and of the future of Japan and the world, we cannot but recognize that the way which seems perhaps too idealistic is the most realistic way to bring about world peace. “Gist of the Hopes of Japanese Women for the Anticipated Peace Treaty”2 Epilogue: Postwar Continuity 133 Weed sought advice on this from Mary Beard, with whom she made contact through Katô (Ishimoto) Shidzue, a mutual friend.4 The political scientist Susan Pharr has argued that important reforms, including a number of laws improving women’s rights, and the creation of the Women and Minors Bureau emerged from this political alliance between low-ranking American officers led by Weed and a core group of Japanese women who were active in raising women’s status in Japan.5 In parallel, Beate Sirota Gordon (1923–2012) of the Government Section at GHQ/SCAP, who wrote drafts for Articles 24 and 14 on which the (somewhat watered down) equal rights content of the new Constitution of Japan was based, was not a member of this informal binational alliance, having to do her official work in secret. However, this international feminist discourse shared by the informal alliance and by Gordon should be credited for providing much more progressive legislation for women than was available in the United States at that time, including that equal rights were enshrined in the Japanese Constitution.6 A concerted campaign to ensure that the women’s rights aspects of the Constitution were retained was conducted by the thirty-nine women elected members of the Lower House of the National Diet in April 1946, along with numerous major women’s organizations, including the Japanese League of Women Voters and the Women’s Democratic Club.7 If we reflect on Beard and Weed’s understanding about women’s roles shared in common across all modern patriarchies and their aim to uplift women in general, it is clear that this advisory and supportive relationship with Japan was not an example of the hierarchical dichotomy of “feminist Orientalism.” As Beard wrote to Weed in 1946: It seems to me so infinitely preferable for the women of Japan to be encouraged, as you [Ethel Weed] encourage them, to think and act from their own intelligence and understanding of what it means to emerge from feudalism to self-government, over a reliance on “missions ” dispatched from the U.S. as their guides. If published reports by Pearl A. Wanamaker and Emily Woodward are evidence of the kind of help to be expected from an “educational” mission, then in my opinion we’d better not send such Americans to Japan. Their naivete is colossal.8 Beard was able to contribute because she had deepened her insight into women’s roles in society, having a firm belief that Japanese women, as...

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