During the Meiji and Showa periods of imperial rul
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During the Meiji and Showa periods of imperial rule, 1868-1945, Japan underwent a number of changes as it emerged from three hundred years of closed-border, feudal government under the Tokugawa Shogunate. Part and parcel of those changes was the transition of Japanese gender ideology from an anti-woman, Confucian model (Nolte, p. 5) to a mid-World War II idealization of woman as "the mother of the nation" (Miyake, p. 277). On the surface, it was a very drastic about-face in terms of the role women played in Japanese society. Ironically, though, Confucian ideals were cited to legitimize both schools of thinking (Moser, p. 32) - which brings to the fore this question: Did the role of women in Japanese society really change during the Meiji and Showa periods up to the Second World War, or were the articulated ideals of change merely political demagoguery?As a prelude to further examination, it should be noted that one group will always be under-represented in this type of discussion: the men and women of the agricultural sector. As normal in discussions of a society's articulated ideals, the illiterate portion of the population - even if it constitutes a majority, as did the Japanese peasantry - rarely has a spokesperson from within the group to represent their case. The Japanese peasantry apparently did not share the same preoccupations with male-female relationships as represented by the urban and/or educated experts on the issue during the periods under discussion.
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. Thus, during the Tokugawa era, relations between men and women were put on a purely familial, as opposed to conjugal, basis. The emphasis was upon the extended family - the husband's family: a woman entering a marriage would join the household of the husband's parents, fulfill her conjugal duties for the purpose of childbearing only (male children, it was always hoped for), and after that sublimate her own personality to the ways and wishes of her parents-in-law (Kaibara, pp. 37-38; Moser, p. 3). In all realms - familial, legal, social - the male was assumed highly superior to the female.
The end of Tokugawa rule brought a shock to Japanese culture: in one short decade the country was thrust from its cozy 300 years' isolation into the middle of 19th Century world affairs - which, at that time, included a fair amount of Western imperialism aimed at subduing Asian nationalism to the will of Euro-American military-industrial might. The declining days of the Tokugawa saw Japan forced into signing a number of demeaning treaties with the technologically-superior Western powers. The overthrow of the Shogunate by the Emperor Meiji-oriented faction of government, the Sonno Joi, was not so much a matter of coup as it was an issue
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Shogun Takaishi, World War, Abstract Meiji, Modern Girl, Tokugawa Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Britain United, War II, Japanese Takaishi, Tokugawa Shogunate, japanese society, gender ideology, np pp, japanese peasantry, merchant class, modern girl, japanese gender ideology, war ii, moser pp, silverberg pp, japanese gender, nt np pp, women japanese society, kapadia eds york, japan cranner-byng kapadia,
Approximate Word count = 2760
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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