Women's Issues in Japanese History

This paper is highlights three issues in the study of women's issues in Japanese history, as identified in the introduction to Women and Class in Japanese History, edited by Hitomi Tonomura and Anne Walthall. The first is the literary movement which experienced a rebirth during the nineteenth century and was typified in some ways by the career of Matsuo Taseko, whom Walthall explores in depth in her history, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman. The second is the issue of prostitution in Japan, which culminated in the enforced enlistment of "comfort women" to serve Allied occupation forces following World War II, which Yuki Tanaka discusses in some depth in Japan's Comfort Women. The third issue is the role of samurai women, which Yamakawa Kikue touches on in "Women in Samurai Family." These three subjects provide interesting areas for examining and researching the changing role of women in Japanese history.

Tonomura and Walthall ( ) write, "The nineteenth century marked the return of women writers to an expanded literary public sphere, although women had continued to write since the Heian period" (p. 13). One of the important women of this time was Matsuo Taseko (1811-94), who they describe as a rural entrepreneur, poet, and political activist" (p. 13). According to Walthall's biography, Taseko was an influential figure in bringing about the Meiji Restoration, and her influence was due in part to her gender. As Walthall (1998) writes, "Had she been a man, her deeds wo

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Japan in this time, "the bobbed-haired, short-skirted modern girl (modan garu); the self-motivated housewife (shufu); and the rational, extroverted professional working woman (shokugyo fujin)" (p. 7). She argues that these images were the product of rising consumerism and promulgated by mass media. She also argues that these iconic images represented a public persona that did not always reflect the private realities of women's lives in an increasingly modern society. Nevertheless, the modern girl, the modern housewife, and the modern working woman all typified the dramatic transformation of Japanese society as a whole, while disguising the fact that women were not actually able to take on new roles or gain new powers. Sato (2003) argues, "Economically, culturally, and even institutionally, the illusion of stability made it difficult for women to embrace the new or different" (p. 154). Robertson's book, Takarazuka, is a history of an all-female revue started in 1914 in Japan, which turned many of these kinds of images into figures of entertainment. She (1998) contends, "The stereotype of the Japanese as a homogenous people has had the corollary effect of whitewashing a colorful variety of gender identities and sexual practi

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