Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry
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Society, of course, does not change as rapidly as laws do, and many women did not
exercise their newly acquired rights. Siblings often signed their inheritance rights
away to the oldest son, and parents continued to arrange marriages. Harald Fuess
notes that because of the continued legality of consensual divorces, the actual practice
of divorce remained largely unchanged.
47
The aspect of Japanese women’s experience under the American occupation that
has attracted the most scholarly attention is their relationship with the men of the
occupying military force. Yuki Tanaka documents sexual violence inflicted by the
occupying forces, the establishment of official brothels, and the increase in the
number of prostitutes during the period of occupation.
48
In her book on racism
during the occup ation, Yukiko Koshiro touches on both war brides and mixed blood
children.
49
Although Koshiro’s emphasis is on the racism of both US and Japanese
government policies, her work draws attention to non-commercial, long-term rela-
tionships between Japane se women and American men.
For a variety of reasons, the research that has shaped our understanding about
women in Japan since 1952 has been done primarily by anthropologists, sociologists,
and political scientists. ‘‘Woman’’ did not emerge as a subjec t of scholarly research in
Japan until the 1970s. Historians, for their part, have been slow to acknowledge
Japan’s long postwar era as their disc iplinary territory. In the 1970s, when American
social scientists undertook the study of Japanese women, their field of vision was
dominated by the Japanese housewife. The high visibility of wives was due in large
measure to the economic transformations of the immediate postwar era. Large-scale
migration from farms to urban areas divided work from home along gendered lines.
Male adults spent their days in factories and offices and companies encouraged
workers to have full-time wives to maintain the home. At the other end of the social
scale, the wages of maids rose to the point where they became beyond the reach of all
but the very wealthy. Suzanne Vogel was one of the first to articulate the concept of
the ‘‘profes sional housewife.’’ Sociologist Anne Imamura and anthropologists Anne
Allison and Joy Hendry are just a few of the many scholars who have added to our
knowledge of middle-class housewifery and motherhood. Dorinne Kondo’s partici-
pant-observer study in a working-class neighborhood of Tokyo is an important
corrective to the class bias inherent in the essentialization of the Japanese woman as
housewife.
50
The strong pressures on postwar women to succeed as wives and
mothers inform our best studies of women’s political participation, Susan Pha rr’s
inquiry into the self-conceptualization of women political activists of the 1970s and
Robin LeBlanc’s analysis of the relationship of housewives to politics in the 1990s.
51
The constitution guaranteed women equal pay for equal work, but a number of
factors contributed to a pattern in which women earned much less than men. Until
the mid-1950s, over half of employed women worked in agriculture. The rapid
decline in the 1950s in the percentage of the population engag ed in agriculture
contributed to a decline between 1955 and the mid-1970s in the rate of women’s
participation in the labor force.
52
The lifetime employment system that developed in
Japan to meet the needs of male workers kept female wages low. A number of talented
historians have combined their archival skills with ethnography to extend our under-
standing of women’s work. Gail Bernstein’s participant-observer research in Iwate in
the mid-1970s provides us with insights into the lives of fa rm women. Simon Partner
reconstructed the life of Toshie
´
, a woman born into a farm household in Niigata in
380 SALLY A. HASTINGS
1926 to examine changes in the social and economic life of the Japanese countryside
during the Sho
¯
wa era. Drawing insights from her extensive research on New Hamp-
shire mill workers, Tamara Hareven conducted interviews over a number of years with
the weavers of the Nishijin distri ct of Kyoto. She interviewed both men and women
and set her findings in the context of the intersection of family and work.
53
The postwar reform of the educational system gave women access to the same
educational opportunities enjoyed by male students. Mary Brinton has shown, how-
ever, that at least until the 1980s, mothe rs were considerably more interested in
university education for sons than for their daughters. For women, the chief incen tive
for higher education has been to make a better marriage match or to be a better
mother.
54
Some of the relatively few women who availed themselves o f the new access
to higher education have achieved prominence as politicians, bureaucrats, and
scholars.
Organized women have continued to be a factor in the public sphere even after the
attainment of suffrage and legal equality in the postwar reforms. Large numbers of
women have been memb ers of regional women’s associations and the Housewives’
Federation (Shufuren). The Housewives’ Federation, founded by Oku Mumeo in
1948, has brought numerous consumer issues to government attention, beginning
with the defective matches that occasioned the founding of the organization.
55
Affiliates of international organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union (WCTU), the Young Me n’s Christian Association (YMCA), and the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) have joined forces to protest
on issues such as the revival of prewar holidays and sex tours to Korea.
56
Ichikawa
Fusae’s suffrage movem ent was institutionalized in the postwar era as the League of
Women Voters. Ichikawa built up around her organization a center that issues a
journal on women’s political activities and has been influe ntial in the publication of
materials on the history of the women’s movement. In the 1970s, Japanese women
participated in a liberation movement. Tanaka Mitsui’s ‘‘Fighting Women,’’ for
instance, denounced the prevailing conventions that divided women into mothers
or whores.
57
The dem ands of the Japanese movement were somewhat different from
those of its American counterpart. Reproductive rights were not central, for from the
late 1940s Japanese women had easy access to birth control and abortion. Most of the
rights that American women sought in the Equal Rights Amendment had been
inscribed in the 1947 Japanese constitution. To be sure, the Japanese women’s
movement has had to fight off sporadic efforts to curtail access to abortion. The
fact that the Japanese gover nment did not approv e the birth control pill for general
use until 1999 (after Viagra had won approval) is cer tainly indicative of the low
priority government policy-make rs place on women’s control over their own bodies,
but the issue was not a major one for women’s organizations. Some of the legal issues
for which women have fought are the right to retain their own names after marriage
and an end to discrimination against illegitimate children.
One important concern of the postwar women’s movement has been the sexual
exploitation of women. Japanese and Korean women joined forces in the 1970s to
protest against sex tours of Japanese businessmen to Korea. Feminist organizations
have been active in recent years in meeting the needs of women brought from
Southeast Asia to work as ‘‘entertainers.’’ As noted above, Japanese feminists have
fought for compensation for the wartime ‘‘comfort women.’’
GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN 381
In terms of achieving legal equality for women, always one of the benchmarks for
determining women’s position in a society, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act
(EEOA) that the Diet passed in 1985 as part of a broader effort to bring Japan into
conformity with the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) stands as a major landmark . The
EEOA prohibited gender discrimination in recruitment, hiring, transfer, and promo-
tion. Several factors limited the degree of social change that resulted from the new
legal provisions, however. The opening of management positions in large companies
to women affected only the small number of women with the academic credentials
eligible for such jobs. Moreover, the EEOA went into effect jus t as the economy sank
into a long-last ing recession, making new positions more difficult for anyone to
obtain, regardless of gender. Other changes that were made to bring Japan into
conformity with the UN convention have had greater effects on the lives of
women. Under the revised Nationality Law, both men and women could transmit
Japanese citizenship, which was defined by blood rather than place of birth, to their
children. Up to that time, only the children of Japanese fathers were recognized as
Japanese citizens. On a more mundane level, in 1994 home economics became a
compulsory su bject for both boys and gi rls.
58
In every era of modern Japanese history, women who sought personal, political,
and financial autonomy have faced both the weight of tradition (sometimes invented)
and the power of the state. The effects of the EEOA have played out in
what demographers characterize as ‘‘Japan’s aging population.’’ Demographers
have been concerned since the 1970s with the implications for government finances
of Japan’s high life expectancy and its low birth rate. In the new millennium,
the average age of first marriage has ri sen while the birth rate has continued
to fall. Policy-makers alternate between castigating young women and offering
concessions to make marriage more attractive. It seems likely that the next set of
struggles between feminists and policy-makers will center around these demographic
concerns.
NOTES
1 See, for instance, Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, pp. 5–7.
2 Tocco, ‘‘Norms and Texts.’’
3 Fister, ‘‘Female Bunjin’’; Sakaki, ‘‘Sliding Doors.’’
4 Walthall, The Weak Body and ‘‘The Cult of Sensibility.’’
5 Seigle, Yoshiwara.
6 Uno, ‘‘Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor’’; Walthall, ‘‘The Life
Cycle of Farm Women.’’
7 Uno, ‘‘Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor’’; Yamakawa, Women of
the Mito Domain.
8 Uno, ‘‘Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor’’; Walthall, ‘‘The Life
Cycle of Farm Women’’; Niwa, ‘‘The Formation of the Myth of Motherhood.’’ For an
exploration of literary images of the family system, see Nagata, ‘‘Images of the Familyon
Stage.’’
9 Burns, ‘‘The Body as Text,’’ p. 193.
10 Ibid., pp. 203–5.
382 SALLY A. HASTINGS
11 See, for instance, Schalow, ‘‘Male Love in Early Modern Japan.’’
12 Drawing on the work of Linda Kerber, Ueno Chizuko has been attentive to the correl-
ation between military conscription and first-class citizenship in modern nation-states
(Ueno, Nationalism and Gender, p. 166).
13 Karlin, ‘‘The Gender of Nationalism.’’ On the higher schools, see Roden, Schooldays in
Imperial Japan.
14 Sievers, Flowers in Salt ; Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, pp. 2–12, 28, 60–6;
Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, pp. 29–50.
15 Patessio, ‘‘Women’s Participation in the Popular Rights Movement.’’
16 See, for instance, Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, pp. 51–74.
17 Nolte and Hastings, ‘‘The Meiji State’s Policy toward Women.’’
18 See, for instance, Hastings, ‘‘The Empress’ New Clothes’’ and ‘‘A Dinner Party Is Not a
Revolution’’; Fru¨hstu¨ck, Colonizing Sex.
19 On Yamakawa Sutematsu, Nagai Shigeko, and Tsuda Umeko, the three girls educated in
America, see Furuki, White Plum, and Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education.
20 Nurses and midwives have generally not been incorporated into histories of Japanese
feminists, but a number of recent studies provide insight into these professions. See for
instance Terazawa, ‘‘The State, Midwives, and Reproductive Surveillance.’’
21 On Kobe College, see Ishii, American Women Missionaries at Kobe College.
22 On the life of Tsuda Umeko, founder of Tsuda English Academy, see Fur uki, White Plum,
and Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education.
23 Mary Brinton points out that in the 1909 factory census, the first done in Japan, women
made up 62 percent of the manufacturing sector. Of those women, 84 percent were in the
textile industry (Brinton, Women and the Economic Miracle, p. 118; see also Tsurumi,
Factory Girls).
24 Walthall, ‘‘Nishimiya Hide.’’
25 See Nishikawa, ‘‘The Changing Form of Dwellings’’; Sand, ‘‘At Home in the Meiji
Period’’; Uno, Passages to Modernity, pp. 38–46.
26 Danly, In the Shade of Green Leaves ; Copeland, Lost Leaves.
27 On the Patriotic Women’s Association, see Sievers, Flowers in Salt, pp. 114–15. For the
life of a woman active in pro-state organizations, see Hastings, ‘‘Hatoyama Haruko.’’
28 On the Tokyo Women’s Reform Society, see Sievers, Flowers in Salt, pp. 87–113, and
Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 98–100.
29 Fru¨hstu¨ck, Colonizing Sex; Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire.
30 A good account of the Bluestocking Society (Seito
¯
sha) is provided by Sievers, Flowers in
Salt, pp. 163–88.
31 Rodd, ‘‘Yosano Akiko and the Taisho
¯
Debate’’; Molony, ‘‘Equality versus Difference.’’
On Yamakawa Kikue, see Tsurumi, ‘‘Visions of Women and the New Society in Conflict.’’
32 Wu, ‘‘Performing Gender.’’
33 Nolte, ‘‘Women’s Rights and Society’s Needs,’’ p. 690.
34 Nishikawa, ‘‘Japan’s Entry into War.’’
35 Brinton, Women and the Economic Miracle, p. 118.
36 Sato, The New Japanese Woman; Nagy, ‘‘Middle-Class Working Women’’; Tamanoi,
Under the Shadow of Nationalism
, pp. 55–83; and Mathias, ‘‘Female Labour in the
Japanese Coal-Mining Industry.’’
37 See for instance Molony, ‘‘Activism among Women,’’ and Hunter, ‘‘Textile Factories,
Tuberculosis, and the Quality of Life.’’
38 Sato, The New Japanese Woman; Silverberg, ‘‘The Modern Girl as Militant’’; Silverberg,
‘‘The Cafe
´
Waitress Serving Modern Japan.’’ See also Tipton, ‘‘The Cafe
´
.’’
39 Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, pp. 286–8.
40 Robertson, Takarazuka.
GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN 383
41 Miyake, ‘‘Doubling Expectations.’’
42 Fru¨hstu¨ck, Colonizing Sex.
43 Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, pp. 110–11; Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women.
44 On the 1946 election, see O
¯
gai, ‘‘The Stars of Democracy.’’ Helen Hopper has written a
biography of Kato
¯
Shizue, one of the first thirty-nine elected, in A New Woman of Japan.
45 For an overview of women in the national legislature, see Hastings, ‘‘Women Legislators
in the Postwar Diet.’’
46 Susan Pharr has documented how women’s rights came to be included in the constitution
(Pharr, ‘‘The Politics of Women’s Rights’’).
47 Fuess, Divorce in Japan, p. 147.
48 Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, pp. 110–66.
49 Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms.
50 Vogel, ‘‘Professional Housewife’’; Imamura, Urban Japanese Housewives ; Allison, ‘‘Pro-
ducing Mothers’’; Hendry, ‘‘The Role of the Professional Housewife’’; Kondo, Crafting
Selves.
51 Pharr, Political Women in Japan; LeBlanc, Bicycle Citizens.
52 Brinton, Women and the Economic Miracle, p. 27.
53 Bernstein, Haruko’s World; Partner, Toshie
´
; Hareven, The Silk Weavers of Kyoto.
54 Brinton, Women and the Economic Miracle, pp. 42, 199.
55 On the Housewives’ Federation, see Narita, ‘‘Women in the Motherland.’’
56 See, for instance, Mackie, Feminism in Moder n Japan, 205.
57 Ibid., pp. 144–5.
58 Ibid., pp. 191–2.
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GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN 387
FURTHER READING
The two-volume set, Gender and Jap anese History, edited by Wakita Haruko, Anne
Bouchy, and Ueno Chizuko (Osaka: Osaka University Pres s, 1999), provides access
to recent work by Japanese scholars. The single best account of the women’s move-
ment in modern Japan is Vera Mackie, Feminism in Moder n Japan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003). The articles collected in Gail Bernstein, ed.,
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991) and Janet Hunter, ed., Japanese Women Working (London: Routledge,
1993) are highly readable and invaluable sources of information on the lives of
ordinary women. Flowers in Salt by Sharon Sievers (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1983) provides a n excellent account of feminism in the Meiji era. In The
New Japanese Woman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), Barbara Sato has
used cultural history to illuminate the lives of urban middle-class women in the
interwar years. Translations and ethnographic studies allow insights into particular
times and places in Japanese society. The selections in Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the
Way to the Gallows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) give voice to
women across several decades who opposed the Japanese state. Nakano Makiko,
Makiko’s Diary: A Merchant Wife in 1910 Kyoto (Stanfor d, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1995), provides an extraordinary window into an urban merchant household.
Karen Colligan-Taylor has performed an extraordinary service in translating Yamazaki
Tomoko’s Sandakan No. 8: An Episode in the History of Lower-Class Japanese Women
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), Yamazaki’s investigative report on the Japanese
women who worked overseas as prostitutes in the prewar era. In Women of Okinawa:
Nine Voices from a Garrison Island (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000),
Ruth Ann Keyso records the experience of women on the margins of Japanese society.
Jackie Kim, in her book Hidden Treasures: Lives of First-Generation Korean Women in
Japan (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), tells the stories of women
whose long sojourns in Japan began during the colonial era. The best historical
overview of sexual knowledge in modern Japan is Sabine Fru¨hstu¨ck, Colonizing Sex
(Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press, 2003). Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies
of Desire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) is an essential source on
male–male desire and practice.
388 SALLY A. HASTINGS
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Class and Social Stratification
Ian Neary
Social stratification is usually associated with classes, people who share similar life
chances as a result of their position within the labor market. However societies may
also be structured around ascriptions of status or ability to command. Thus, John
Scott explains, class situations
arise from the property and market relations that establish patterns of domination by
virtue of constellations of interests and that result from the rational calculative alignment
of economic interests. Status situations . . . result from communal relations through
which domination on the basis of prestige is established . . . command situations are a
consequence of the relations of command that are built into structures of legitimate
domination.
1
Rarely will a society be organized around either class or status or command; more
usually there will be a complex interplay between the three and over time it will be
possible to observe changes in their relative significance. This chapter will provide an
overview of the main themes relating to social stratification in Japan in the early
modern period and postw ar, and review the situation of outcaste groups.
The Early Modern Period
The shi-no
¯
-ko
¯
-sho
¯
(samurai, peasant, artisan, merchant) system is one of the defining
features of Tokugawa Japan. It apparently set the parameters for political, social, and
economic interaction and yet it has received relatively little specialist attention in the
English-language literature. Here I want to explore some of the writing on the topic
beginning with two introductory texts before moving on to the more specialist
literature.
Jon Halliday starts his Political History of Japanese Capitalism with a review of the
class structure of Tokugawa Japan. He notes that the formalization of the class system
amounted to an attempt to ‘‘re-feudalize’’ Japan and was intimately connected to the
seclusion policy (sakoku). Prior to the 1630s, Japan’s emergent merchant class had
been developing trade links with Asia, exte nding their economic and social influence
A Companion to Japanese History
Edited by William M. Tsutsui
Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd