Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II 1439910383, 9781439910382

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chronology
Introduction
1. Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective: Challenging the Discourses of Civilization
Women’s Situation in Modernizing Japan
Christian Social Activism and the Notion of the Women’s Rights Movement
Social Questions and Socialist Women
2. “Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook”: The Development of Cross-cultural Contacts, 1902–1930
Awakening International Feminist Discourse and the IWSA, 1902–1920
Different Perceptions about Women’s Roles in Society: The IWSA Dialogue with Japanese Educators
Propagating Western Knowledge about Women’s Social Activism in the 1910s
The Problem of Unity in the Women’s Rights Movement in Early 1920s Japan
From Social Reform Work to the Unified Suffrage Movement
The First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu in 1928
3. Generating a Feminist Movement through Peace Activism, 1915–1941
No Peace without Equality
The Buildup to the Foundation of the Women’s Peace Association in Japan
In Japanese Women’s Own Image
Women Pacifists in International Politics
Expanding Spaces for Peace Activism
Combining a Nuanced Strategy with a Middle Way
4. From Private to Public: Ishimoto Shidzue and the Birth Control Movement up to 1941
Ishimoto Shidzue and the Development of Feminist Consciousness
Ishimoto’s Encounter with the Discourse of the Birth Control Movement
From the Private to the Public
Ishimoto Shidzue in America, 1924
Linking Birth Control with Suffrage
Broadening Feminist Consciousness
5. Using Their Initiative at Home and Beyond: Suffragists’ Wartime Activism, 1931–1941
The Women’s Rights Movement in the Aftermath of the Manchurian Incident
Women’s Initiative in Wartime Social Activism during the Second Sino-Japanese War
Writing for Japanese Women
The Gap between American and Japanese Women Widens
The Suspension of Suffragist Activism
Conclusion
Epilogue: Postwar Continuity
Appendix A: Notable People
Appendix B: Notable Organizations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II

Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II

Taeko Shibahara

Temple University Press Philadelphia

Temple University Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2014 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shibahara, Taeko, 1951–   Japanese women and the transnational feminist movement before World War II / Taeko Shibahara.   pages cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-1-4399-1038-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-1040-5 (e-book)  1.  Feminism—Japan— History—20th century.  2.  Feminism—Japan—History—19th century.  3. Women’s rights—Japan—History. I. Title.   HQ1762.S476 2014  305.42095209′034—dc23 2013043342 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 246897531

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations ix Chronology xi Introduction 1

1 Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective: Challenging the Discourses of Civilization Women’s Situation in Modernizing Japan Christian Social Activism and the Notion of the Women’s Rights Movement Social Questions and Socialist Women

7 11 15 19

2 “Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook”: The Development of Cross-cultural Contacts, 1902–1930 22 Awakening International Feminist Discourse and the IWSA, 1902–1920 26 Different Perceptions about Women’s Roles in Society: The IWSA Dialogue with Japanese Educators 32 Propagating Western Knowledge about Women’s Social 35 Activism in the 1910s The Problem of Unity in the Women’s Rights Movement 37 in Early 1920s Japan From Social Reform Work to the Unified Suffrage Movement 42 The First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu in 1928 50

vi Contents

3 Generating a Feminist Movement through Peace Activism, 1915–1941 58 No Peace without Equality 62 The Buildup to the Foundation of the Women’s Peace Association in Japan 64 In Japanese Women’s Own Image 68 Women Pacifists in International Politics 71 Expanding Spaces for Peace Activism 73 Combining a Nuanced Strategy with a Middle Way 77 4 From Private to Public: Ishimoto Shidzue and the Birth Control Movement up to 1941 82 Ishimoto Shidzue and the Development of Feminist Consciousness 84 Ishimoto’s Encounter with the Discourse of the Birth Control Movement 86 From the Private to the Public 91 Ishimoto Shidzue in America, 1924 95 Linking Birth Control with Suffrage 97 Broadening Feminist Consciousness 98 5 Using Their Initiative at Home and Beyond: Suffragists’ Wartime Activism, 1931–1941 103 The Women’s Rights Movement in the Aftermath of the Manchurian Incident 106 Women’s Initiative in Wartime Social Activism during the Second Sino-Japanese War 114 Writing for Japanese Women 116 The Gap between American and Japanese Women Widens 121 The Suspension of Suffragist Activism 122 Conclusion 127 Epilogue: Postwar Continuity 132 Appendix A: Notable People 137 Appendix B: Notable Organizations 145 Notes 147 Bibliography 185 Index 201

Acknowledgments

I

t is with great pleasure that I thank the many people whose support made this book possible. Initially, this project began as a dissertation for Doshisha University. My mentor, Gavin James Campbell, inspired me with his vision of historiography. He not only provided me with practical theories and methodologies for constructing ideas in writing but also conveyed the moral responsibility inherent in becoming a historian. I also thank Barbara Brown Zikmund, who guided my academic interest in American women’s history, and Sugimori Nagako, who is the leading scholar on the peace movement in Japan and who encouraged me to research it. I am deeply grateful to a number of institutions in Japan and the United States, including the Library of Congress Manuscript Division; the Smith College Archives; the Swarthmore College Peace Collection; Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College; Mariam Coffin Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College; the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University; Japan Women’s University Library; Doshisha University Library; the International Institute of American Studies library, Doshisha University; and the Fusae Ichikawa Center for Women and Governance. I have received generous support from these institutions, their archivists, and their librarians. I am also indebted to Japan Women’s University, Doshisha University, and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America for dissertation and research grants.

viii Acknowledgments

Some parts of the book were previously published as articles in the Journal of Women’s History, the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000, and the Journal of Asia Pacific Studies. I thank these journals for their generous permission to incorporate parts of the articles into the book. In publishing the original articles, I received critical comments and advice from Jean H. Quataert and anonymous reviewers and editors for the Journal of Women’s History; from Thomas Dublin, Kathryn K. Sklar, and two anonymous reviewers for Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000; and from Sally Hastings, editors, and two unnamed reviewers for the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. I am fortunate that Janet Francendese, executive editor; two anonymous reviewers; and other editors for Temple University Press found value in the manuscript, providing profound and insightful advice and encouragement at every stage so that the content, discussions, and writing itself would do justice to the subject. Also, I owe to an enormous debt to copyeditor Geoff Read. With his profound knowledge about Japan and Japanese culture, he drew out and helped me construct what I really wanted to say in the manuscript, editing the language to flow naturally. In addition, I thank Kôra Rumiko, who kindly gave her permission for the use of the photo of her mother, Wada Tomi, with Jane Addams. I owe an important debt to my friends. Diane Haring was, in addition to a good friend, generous with her valuable suggestions. Our discussions often explored interwar history in Asia and the West. I also thank Elaine and Jim Dodges for their lasting friendship and kind support during my stays in the United States, and Kojima Yumiko for her willingness to support me with her warmhearted sensibility and intelligence. Finally, I thank my family members. My late father, Rokurô, and my mother, Aya, were always by my side and were a haven for me. My sons, Isao, Takeshi, and Atsushi, were my closest friends and a constant source of wit, their support amplified by their spouses, Emiko, Mariko, and Chiharu.

Abbreviations

CIE Civil Information and Education Section FJWO Federation of Japanese Women’s Organizations GHQ/SCAP General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers GJFWA Greater Japan Federation of Women’s Association IAWSEC (IAW) International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship ICW International Council of Women ICWPP International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace IWSA International Woman Suffrage Alliance JCWSG Joint Committee of Women’s Suffrage Groups JWCIR Japan Women’s Committee for International Relations JWCTU Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union JWSC Japan Woman Suffrage Council LWV League of Women Voters NAWSA National American Woman Suffrage Association NCCCW National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War NDWA National Defense Women’s Association NWP National Woman’s Party PPWC Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference

x Abbreviations

TFWO Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations WAC Women’s Army Corps WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom WPAJ Women’s Peace Association in Japan WSA Woman Suffrage Alliance WSL Women’s Suffrage League YWCAJ Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan

Chronology

Meiji Period (1868–1912) 1867 Meiji Restoration 1868 National Charter Oath (Gokajô no Goseimon) An administrative order (Dajôkan Futatsu) 1871 Iwakura Mission; Tsuda Umeko is sent to America to study 1872 Prostitutes Mandatory Release (Shôgi Kaihô Rei) Ban on Christianity lifted 1880 Regulations on Public Meetings Ordinance (Shûkai Jôrei) (revised   in 1882) Criminal Code restricts abortion (revised in 1907) 1885 Ôsaka Incident 1887 Peace Preservation Ordinance (Hoan Jôrei) 1889 Meiji Constitution 1890 Political Assembly and Association Law (Shûkai Oyobi Seisha Hô) 1894 First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) begins 1898 Meiji Civil Code 1900 Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hô) Tsuda Umeko founds Joshi Eigaku Juku 1901 Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujinkai) is founded 1904 Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) begins IWSA launches in Berlin

xii Chronology

1907 Sekai Fujin (Women of the World) is published (until 1909) Great Treason Trial (Taigyaku Jiken Shinri) Hiratsuka Raichô founds the Blue-stocking Society (Seitôsha) 1912 Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs visit Japan and meet   Japanese women leaders

Taishô Period (1912–1926) 1914 World War I (1914–1918) begins 1915 International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace   (ICWPP) is organized 1919 League of Nations is founded New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai) is organized 1921 Women’s Peace Association in Japan (Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai) is  founded Red Wave Society (Sekirankai) is organized JWCTU’s Japan Woman Suffrage Council (Nihon Fujin  Sanseiken Kyôkai) is formed International Disarmament Week Washington Conference 1922 Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hô) is  amended Charles and Mary Beard visit Japan 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake Charles and Mary Beard visit Japan Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations (TFWO; Tokyo  Rengô Fujinkai) is organized 1924 Women’s Suffrage League (Fujin Sanseiken Kakutoku Kisei  Dômeikai, renamed Fusen Kakutoku Dômei in 1925) is founded Johnson-Reed Immigration Act

Shôwa Period (1926–1989) 1928 First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu 1930 Fifth National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War   (NCCCW) in Washington Gauntlett Tsune and Hayashi Uta show Japanese women’s peace   petition to the NCCCW attendees Women delegates from the United States, Britain, and Japan   present peace petitions to the London Naval Conference

Chronology  xiii

1931 Manchurian Incident 1932 General Disarmament Conference in Geneva WILPF’s petition campaign 1933 Japan withdraws from the League of Nations Third Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu 1935 WPAJ holds a peace song lyric-writing competition WPAJ sends friendly letters written by Japanese girls to the United  States and China 1937 Fourth Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Vancouver Second Sino-Japanese War breaks out 1938 Women’s Suffrage League publishes Japanese Women 1940 National Eugenics Law (Kokumin Yûsei Hô) 1941 Pacific War breaks out 1945 Japan surrenders Occupation by GHQ/SCAP under General MacArthur begins Japanese government decides woman’s suffrage, October 10 MacArthur announces reform directives, October 11 1946 First national election in which women can vote is held, April 10 1951 Peace Treaty is signed in San Francisco

Introduction In the beginning, Woman was truly the Sun. An authentic person. Now, Woman is the Moon. A sickly, pale-face moon, living off another, reflecting another’s brilliance. We must now recapture our hidden Sun.1 Hiratsuka Raichô, “In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun”

T

his book is a study of the development of distinctive forms of feminist consciousness among Japanese middle-class women in Tokyo from 1871 to 1941 and their exchanges with mainly white, middle-class, American feminists. These Japanese women had the means to travel and also the inclination to combine idealism with activism and an engagement with the modernization process in Japan.2 Their awakening was forged, despite everincreasing pressure from nationalism and militarism, with the help of a feminist movement that originated in the West. Encompassing the discourses of women’s rights movements in Japan, the United States, and to a lesser extent Europe, and looking in more detail at the issues of peace, birth control, and suffrage, I explore the complex ways that middle-class Japanese feminists negotiated a humanitarian space within Japan’s expansion as a nationalist, militarist, imperialist, and patriarchal power. They were able to do this because Japan aspired to engage in the discourse of modern Western nations that was increasingly adopting the elevation of women’s status as one of the premises of “civilization.” Although women of American or European origin (hereafter, Western women) were actually socially and legally subordinate, they had promoted the feminist movement by taking advantage of the pretensions of this contemporary discourse to higher civilization, arguing that women’s full citizenship was necessary in any civilized society. Japanese women in parallel attempted to turn their own state’s drive to “modernize” and to “civilize” itself to their advantage. Thus, the contradiction of women’s unliberated status existing

2 Introduction

in an emerging modern nation created a basis for Japanese feminist movements, which adapted and localized Western feminists’ approaches, to argue for sociopolitical and economic equality between the sexes.3 Recent historical studies on international women’s organizations have shown significant links between domestic and international feminist movements. For example, Leila J. Rupp’s study shows “the creation of a collective identity in international women’s organizations” between 1888 and 1945.4 Ian Tyrrell’s study explores Christian women’s transnational feminist movement promoted by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in America between 1880 and 1930.5 These studies highlight collaborative international relationships, and yet they also suggest that behind such ­women’s activism was a belief in the superiority of Western civilization: Western women regarded themselves as civilizing agents when they promoted the notion of women’s rights in other, non-Western nations. With the beginning of modernization in 1868, Japan became one such arena for the international women’s rights movement. Yasutake Rumi’s work has shown the vital early links between the WCTU and the Japanese WCTU ( JWCTU; Nihon Fujin Kirisutokyô Kyôfûkai) up to 1920.6 Christian missionaries visited Japan and promoted women’s education, paving the way to organize the JWCTU in 1886. The Japanese branch supported the “Americanization” and “Westernizing” of Japan by assuming the white, middle-class American cultural values of the era, particularly the “purity and sanctity of home.” 7 In adopting American values to promote social reform in Japan—including aiming to establish monogamy, to abolish licensed prostitution, and to restrict and abolish Japanese prostitution overseas, in addition to promoting temperance—the JWCTU participated in the discourse of the “civilizing mission” led by the WCTU.8 Analyzing this kind of international activism by Western social reformers, many historians argue that these reformers adopted an ideology that has been called “feminist Orientalism.”9 Their analysis is that whatever activism was being promoted by the reformers, their underlying motivation was a sense of their moral superiority to “other” women and a sense of responsibility to uplift what they saw as “weaker” sisters in “less-civilized” racial groups and cultures. They argue that Western women’s international activism embodied the hierarchical power relations between the West and the rest under the prevailing discourse of civilization.10 Aside from these historical studies and analysis of the international feminist movements up to the early twentieth century, other historians have regarded the transnational feminist movement more as an aspect of the “third wave” feminism that began in the late twentieth century and have seen it as

Introduction  3

a distinct concept that is different in nature from earlier efforts. Based on their analyses of third world feminism, historians such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres assert that “women of all colors (including white women) can align themselves with and participate in these imagined communities.”11 They see that such “imagined communities” can be formed as political alliances across lines of gender, race, and class. These historians suggest that, unlike the earlier version of the transnational feminist movement, the third wave is a new humanitarian movement that bridges differences in gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality to promote the welfare and justice of humanity. But did these equal international partnerships really only begin in the latter half of the twentieth century? Following up on these studies, to examine whether this is indeed the case, this book’s additional exploration of middle-class Japanese women’s secular social activism in cooperation with their Western counterparts gives us a window through which to view the women’s rights movement with a broader perspective and over a long timescale. When Western middle-class feminists promoted women’s rights and social justice on the grounds of the equality of the sexes and began in the early twentieth century to expand the scope of their activism beyond national borders to pursue women’s interests internationally,12 some Japanese feminists were in sympathy. Most of the Western women were in fact Christians, but unlike WCTU reformers, they promoted international activism through secular organizations. Although many of the Japanese women participants were likewise Christians, or at least influenced by the ideas of Christian social activism to some degree, they were also liberal social reformers and mostly from the urban middle class, and it is this secular international activity that is covered here. They strove for the equality of the sexes and challenged Japan’s modern patriarchy.13 Within these specific historical conditions, Japanese feminists dynamically negotiated and renegotiated their position in both the national and international realms.14 This book shows how they engaged in, responded to, and localized the discourse of civilization.15 Because of its focus on middle-class women, the book does not detail the activities of more radical feminists, including socialists and anarchists, who also had their international connections but were severely repressed and pushed to the margins of Japanese society. Their important stories have been covered elsewhere, notably by Vera Mackie and Mikiso Hane.16 My aim is to further expand and complicate the story of women’s history, in this case by examining to what degree middle-class Japanese feminists found specifically Japanese solutions. Along with previous studies I hope to aid in sustaining multiple viewpoints on this period.

4 Introduction

By focusing in turn on the peace, birth control, and suffrage movements before 1941, we can understand the intricate nature of the feminist movement in Japan, a nature that cannot be fully accounted for by the dichotomous views of feminist Orientalism. Japanese women recognized and valued the specific expertise and experience of Western feminist movements, gained mostly through communication with American middle-class feminists, but they did not accept these templates uncritically. Rather, reinterpreting them and applying them selectively within the Japanese context, they promoted civilizing strategies in Japanese modern patriarchy that were distinct from both Japanese nationalism and Western international feminism. Many of the Japanese women in this book supported nationalism to some degree— specifically the political movement beginning in the early Meiji era, which aimed to transform a closed, feudal Japan into a modern, independent state, while preserving what were seen as key Japanese traditions. But I argue that their support did not originate in what Raymond Williams calls “nationalist feeling (bad if it is another’s country, making claims against one’s own).” Rather, it was “national feeling (good),” which allowed them to embrace international sensibilities, too. They had both national and international feelings.17 In looking at this period it is legitimate to explore to what degree it is appropriate to associate feminism with a fixed set of Western enlightenment ideas and to examine how feminism can coexist with nationalism, internationalism, and social constructs relating to the government, the family, and society based on non-Western traditions. The relationship of gender to the modern Japanese nation-state has been a focus of interest for scholars. Historians of the women’s rights movement in particular have observed the ways in which Japanese women struggled to gain the political, social, and economic rights that were denied to them by the state. It has been seen that the women found their agency mired in struggles and negotiations in a misogynist society within national constraints. For example, Sharon L. Sievers’s Flowers in Salt: The Beginning of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan, Vera Mackie’s Creating Socialist Women in Japan, and Kumari Jayawardena’s Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World explore how Japanese feminists struggled at this time. Research on the feminist and suffrage movements after the Manchurian Incident in 1931 has further highlighted the complexities of the gender-state relationship in the Japanese context. The historian Yoshimi Kaneko’s work shows that Japanese suffragists fell victim to domestic political and ideological pressure: they were forced to reduce their activism and became subsumed into government war policies.18 Research by many other scholars, including the

Introduction  5

historian Suzuki Yûko, shows that even though the government curbed their agency, the feminists were nevertheless often “perpetrators” in that they actively helped to create the war state. The feminists cooperated with the war regime to empower Japanese women but in doing so sacrificed the interests of other Asian women, including Chinese and Korean women. The historian Barbara Molony’s research shows that suffrage leader Ichikawa Fusae (whose activities are described in Chapter 5) cooperated with the government during the war to allow women to gain entry into the sociopolitical realm of Japanese society. This cooperation was Ichikawa’s choice.19 In the history of feminism this is not the only time others have paid the price for compromise under the tension between national and feminist identity. In such cases it is useful to understand reasons, rationales, and precedents for such choices and to make a cost-benefit analysis, rather than to oversimplify with hindsight; there is always something to be learned. In the historian Dee Ann Vavich’s research, for example, even though Japanese suffragists were forced to shift the focus of the movement away from political rights to social issues, such activism laid the groundwork to enfranchise women in 1945.20 Feminists in Europe, Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, while also active in their respective domestic women’s rights movements on issues including peace, birth control, and suffrage, had begun to expand their scope beyond national borders. How did Japanese feminists deal simultaneously with all their mutual concerns—including peace, birth control, and suffrage—in a time of enormous and highly pressured change? Why and how did feminists in the world, including in Japan, begin at this time to interact across national and cultural borders to promote the women’s rights movement?21 This book allows the connections among these multiple strands that stretched across national borders to be seen more clearly. Hence, Chapter 1 lays out the necessary historical and sociopolitical conditions that, coming together, led to international feminism between Japan and the West becoming an effective force. It introduces the key terms and concepts used in this book, many of which have a culturally specific meaning important to understand in a Japanese context. It discusses the impact on women of the discourse of civilization, Japan’s modernization, the Meiji government’s policies for women, and the impact of Christian social activism on the women’s rights movement, and it touches on socialist women. Chapter 2 details the first contacts between Western middle-class reformers and their counterparts in Japan, the development of the internationalist feminist movement, and its role as a catalyst for the feminist movement among this cohort of Japanese women in the period leading up to 1941. I argue that these Japanese feminists, while acknowledging the benefits of

6 Introduction

the ideals of Western feminism encountered through face-to-face contacts with and writings from their Western sisters, went on to apply and interpret them to create new positions in the movement, in a way that would suit their domestic context. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 provide case studies of the women’s rights movement in Japan, focusing respectively on the specific issues of peace, birth control, and suffrage. These chapters explore in detail the crucial outside (mainly American) contact with Japan regarding each issue and how, through what they saw as nonhierarchical and mutually beneficial relationships, Japanese middle-class feminists articulated and localized international feminist causes; how they located and identified themselves as actors for the internationalist feminist movement while promoting local reform; and how in so doing they demonstrated feminists’ ability to create an imagined space that allows women to bridge differences and to coexist with both nationalism and internationalism.

1

Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective Challenging the Discourses of Civilization Race, gender and power—these were the defining attributes of the discourse of civilization. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization

F

or many Western people, the idea of civilization was a corollary of modernity, or as Raymond Williams put it, “an achieved condition of refinement and order” in society, culture, and way of life.1 In particular, nineteenth-century establishment America saw itself as being in the most advanced state of civilization because of its particular attitudes about race, culture, gender, and religion.2 Heavily influenced by the theory of social Darwinism, race theory, and the eugenics theories that gave it a spurious scientific legitimacy, white Anglo-American civilization perceived itself to be at the top of a hierarchical structure representing the evolutionary progress of society. This theory was supported by claims for Anglo-American superiority in industry, technology, and religion and was used to justify the control of “less civilized” nations. This discourse also created an “ideal” model of gender structure in an advanced civilization: while men were strong and aggressive in the public sphere and were the protectors of family, women were fragile and spiritual and expected to dedicate themselves to the private sphere. As with race, this division of gender roles justified the control of women’s inferior socio­ political and economic rights. Therefore, in both race and gender relations, the discourse set Anglo-American civilization and white men at the top of the social order. Moreover, Anglo-American Protestants believed that their civilizing roles were perfected by converting non-Christian races. By establishing white, male, and Protestant as superior positions, the discourse of civilization in the late nineteenth century created a structure of dichotomous

8  Chapter 1

relations of domination and subordination between genders, races, and cultures.3 This structure not only explained but justified gender oppression, racism, and imperialism.4 In spite of its pervasive influence and its basis in scientific, technological, and industrial progress, the discourse of civilization was subject to criticism by the turn of the century. As modern civilization did not serve to create a peaceful and humanitarian society, it became open to doubt. The widespread adoption of industrial capitalism, which flourished under this discourse, alienated its workers, who labored in manufacturing without a sense of satisfaction or fairness but had a clear sense of their own exploitation.5 Situated in a socially subordinate position in the gender hierarchy, some American women had, since the nineteenth century, expressed their discontent with the discourse by means of social reform activism.6 However, for many historians, social reform activism by this group in targeting “other” women is often associated with feminist Orientalism, in which Joyce Zonana has distinguished two related forms of opposition: the racial, or black-white, opposition described by Susan L. Meyer, and cultural, or West-East, opposition.7 These reformers uplifted themselves by simultaneously demonstrating to Anglo-American men that women were both effective in the public sphere and superior to “other” women. For example, suffragists assumed a civilizing mission in American overseas territories to show their capacity to work in support of American interests to their male counterparts. In short, American women social activists from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century promoted social reform activism by making use of the discourse of civilization for their own ends: to enlarge their limited spaces in American patriarchy.8 However, in the early twentieth century, American feminists, together with their European counterparts, began to extend their activism beyond the framework of the existing discourse of civilization, and this widened the focus of their movement from the national to the international. In this shift to a broader perspective, details of differences between civilizations became sublimated. In part, this was the result of a growing consensus among women activists that while the discourse of civilization promoted the progress of society, it nevertheless continued to label women as secondary. In response, women’s rights groups promoted a “humanitarian civilization.” In particular, the scale of destruction and loss of life experienced in modern wars—especially in World War I by Western nations including Germany, France, and Great Britain—gave rise to grave concerns about the belief in the superiority of Western civilization. In response, European and American feminists turned to the concept of universal equality and peace to build

Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective  9

international bridges with other feminists. In so doing, as is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, they found a common basis for activism among women of different nationalities. The notion of a common basis is important, because it suggests that this international activism was what Chandra Talpade Mohanty refers to as “the practice of solidarity.”9 The participants in this activism chose to work and fight together, and to some degree they overcame the barriers of Orientalism. Hence, these American and European feminists believed that international contact was reciprocal and of benefit to all involved. Contact with women in different cultures enabled these Western feminists to become aware of the double standards in their own civilization, which both praised and elevated women and yet held them back from full participation. One explanation of the limitation of women in modern civil society in America and Europe, no doubt, is that the society was built on a much older patriarchal order that justified “men’s patriarchal right over women.”10 Women were from the start excluded from the ideals of freedom and liberty, and instead, women’s subjection to men was a given. Recognizing these flaws, Western feminists promulgated the women’s rights movement, which ultimately led them to assert that women had special responsibilities in the world to create a humanitarian civilization beyond national boundaries. Similarly, Western socialist women were also internationally active to pursue gender equality and peace. For example, they held the International Socialist Congress in 1907 in Stuttgart, where fifty-eight delegates from fifteen countries attended. The Congress adopted a demand for universal suffrage for women. The second conference in 1910 in Copenhagen adopted a resolution to introduce an International Women’s Day, which aimed at the fight for women’s suffrage. In March 1915, the Bern International Women’s Conference promoted a peace rally with participants from the warring nations.11 In parallel with Western imperialism, the discourse of Western civilization wielded enormous influence in male-dominated international politics when targeting other civilizations. Non-Western nations, including Japan, were forced to renegotiate their traditional values during the fraught business of fending off, or establishing relations with, the imperialist powers.12 In particular, in the era of American expansionism in the late nineteenth century, the idea of modernization and civilization became the main theme for U.S.-Japanese relations. Challenged by the United States and forced to sign in 1858 the first of a series of unequal trading treaties with foreign powers known as the Ansei Five-Power Treaties, Japan gave up its centuries-old isolation policy and chose to try to catch up with the modernized powers.

10  Chapter 1

During a turbulent period of internal struggle lasting several years, including civil war and the dramatic restructuring of society, the new Meiji government was established in 1868. This was essentially an oligarchy with the emperor, who was portrayed as divine, restored as titular head. In Japanese Meiji literally meant “enlightened government.” Furthermore, to match the West, Japan advanced quickly along a path of national modernization by adopting a wide range of Western institutional programs for industrial, military, legal, political, and educational reform. These were seen as essential steps in preserving Japan’s sovereign independence, achieving parity with elite Western powers and avoiding the fate of other Asian nations, which had been overrun or colonized. Japan’s choice to become a civilized nation on the Western model was made definitively on April 7, 1868 with the National Charter Oath (Gokajô no Goseimon) drafted by the government leaders. One of the five articles of the oath stipulated, “Knowledge of the entire world shall be sought in order to strengthen the foundations of the imperial throne.”13 Behind this passage was the intent to build up a rich country with a strong army and modern industry (fukokukyôhei) so that Japan could become an advanced nation on the world stage. This was seen as necessary to preserve Japan’s sovereignty and trading position from Western imperialist states. The decades following the Charter Oath were a period of political struggle in Japan over the master narrative of the discourse of civilization. Initially, the government promoted “Westernization Policies” (Ôkaseisaku) that aimed at the revision of the Ansei Five-Power Treaties, as well as the accumulation of Western scientific knowledge. Equal trade and the adoption of Western know-how were both important to Japan if it was to gain recognition as a civilized state worthy of respect. At the same time, the government had to deal with internal challenges to oligarchic male political power, with demands by the Freedom and People’s Rights movement (Jiyû Minken Undô) in the 1870s and 1880s for parliamentary government and a constitution.14 Although discontented members of the abolished samurai class initiated the movement, it soon expanded to include landowners and merchants, poor farmers, and urban workers. This outburst of political participation not only demonstrated considerable dissent against government policies but also increased the consciousness of people’s rights among the nonelite classes.15 This novel idea of people’s rights, along with the publication of Western books in translation, such as Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics and J. S. Mill’s Subjection of Women, formed a platform on which some women launched campaigns on women’s rights and suffrage, including Kusunose Kita (1836–

Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective  11

1920), Kishida Toshiko (also known as Nakajima Shôen) (1864–1901), and Fukuda (née Kageyama) Hideko (1865–1927).16 Kusunose, in Kôchi prefecture, demanded the vote for women in a local election in 1878, which led the local government to approve the right of women to vote and to run for election in local elections in Kôchi, which stood until 1884.17 Kishida and Fukuda were influential in spreading ideas on women’s rights and helping organize women’s groups more widely through many areas of Japan.18 Although one of the next generation of these activists, the socialist feminist Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980), evaluated their activism as no more than a passing fad, writing that “their ideas were too abstract and farfetched to arouse any real interest among the masses of women,”19 their gender equality activism was important as a platform of knowledge that could be built on by later socialists and activists from various backgrounds. To quell the Freedom and People’s Rights movement, the government enforced laws to regulate political meetings, including the Regulations on Public Meetings Ordinance (Shûkai Jôrei) in 1880 (revised in 1882)20 and the Peace Preservation Ordinance (Hoan Jôrei) in 1887. Under them Kishida was imprisoned after she read her paper “Daughters Raised in Boxes” (Hakoiri Musume) in 1883. Fukuda was also forced to disband her private study group, the Shôkôgakusha, in 1884 and imprisoned for her involvement in the Ôsaka Incident in 1885.21 The government further solidified imperial rule with the Meiji Constitution in 1889, which established Asia’s first elected parliament and set out limited civil rights, at the same time ensuring that they could be curtailed by subsequent laws. A rising tide of nationalism, Western intransigence over treaty revision, and the oligarchs’ fears over the democratization of political authority combined to push Japan toward being what was effectively a constitutional monarchy.22 Although the Meiji government aimed to build Japan up into a Western-style civilization, it was also under the contrasting influence of a Confucian tradition. While the role of Confucianism in this period is complex, operating in different ways for different layers of society, it can be argued that Confucian ideas were deliberately reinterpreted and used selectively by the state in ways that would legitimize Japan’s modernization and that this statist Confucianism delayed and inhibited the development of liberal ideas, including the emergence of women as prominent in the public sphere.23

Women’s Situation in Modernizing Japan The Meiji government’s determination to join the imperial powers without abandoning Confucian ideas was also demonstrated in its gender policies.24

12  Chapter 1

Initially, in the early Meiji era, the government planned to use women as civilizing agents. To enlighten women through education, in 1870 it declared the establishment of a women’s high school in Tokyo, explaining that, “we establish a girls’ public school by hiring Western women teachers and admitting students whether noble or common, on their presentation of the tuition [fee].”25 In so doing, the government expected to create women leaders who could contribute to society. To this end, in 1871 the government chose five girls to join the educational and diplomatic Iwakura Mission to the United States and Europe as government students, including Tsuda Umeko (1864–1929), who in 1900 would establish Joshi Eigaku Juku (the Women’s English School).26 They would be educated in America and study Western educational methods for women, so that later they would be able to apply them to teaching girls in Japan. However, as Tsuda realized when she returned to Japan in 1882, the government had changed its stance in the intervening period. It no longer expected women to work in the public sector and had come to regard women’s higher education as unimportant.27 Because of the upsurge of political discontent in the 1880s, the government’s policies became increasingly conservative and intolerant of dissent, and this was reflected in policies affecting women.28 Reversing its initial liberal plan to have educated women participate in the public sphere, the government later expected them to prioritize their family roles. It promoted an education policy for women in the 1880s centered on an ideal of womanhood,29 which the historian Takamure Itsue (1894–1964) referred to as the “nationalistic Japanese notion of good wife and wise mother.”30 This was the Japanese government’s attempt to bind together official ideology with a gender ideology centered on the roles of wife and mother in which women would contribute to the state through their domestic functions. While women’s roles of being caregivers is common to both Western and Japanese traditions, a distinction can be made between the Western notion of maternal duty, which preserved a degree of privacy (at least in peacetime) and the Japanese conception of it, which had traditionally been embedded in a public framework of duty. The Japanese official ideology of motherhood from the 1880s added explicit nationalistic and militaristic roles to maternal duty. Specifically, Minister of Education Mori Arinori attempted to link nationalism and militarism with the Confucian notion of womanhood using rhetoric: the purpose of women’s education was to raise “good wives and wise mothers” who were able to nurture children useful for creating national wealth and power.31 Mori’s notion constituted a new view of womanhood, “an amalgam of European and Confucian ideas,”32 which exhorted women

Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective  13

to give public service to the nation from the home.33 In parallel, under the government’s basic education policy, when working-class girls finished primary education they were directed to join the labor force in support of the national industrialization drive. With these education policies the government ensured that all women supported the ie, or family household, which was founded on a patriarchal family system in which females could not inherit or own property and were meant to obey family males, including their sons. Moreover, in modern terms, family stability in the ie was directly linked with the maintenance of national unity, as part of the “family-state ideology” (kazoku kokkakan). Already with less separation between the private and the public in Japan than in the West, the government intended to bind the private sphere more closely to the state. This ideology therefore tied Japanese women to nationalism.34 Poor women in addition had to support emerging capitalism with their labor, either in farming or increasingly in exploitative and unhealthy conditions in thread mills to produce export items, including silk and cotton.35 Japanese women of all classes were regarded merely as social, economic, and reproductive tools for the imperial project.36 One primary example was in the issue of reproductive control. The Meiji government banned midwives from carrying out abortions in an administrative order (Dajôkan Futatsu) in 1868. Next, it criminalized abortion in Articles 330–335 of the (former) Criminal Code of 1880, and further restricted abortion in Articles 212–216 of the Criminal Code of 1907.37 Behind this policy was the government’s drive to increase Japan’s population to swell the labor force and the expanding military, thereby increasing national strength.38 The government attempted to ban human trafficking by issuing the Prostitutes Mandatory Release (Shôgi Kaihô Rei) in 1872, by which, in theory, prostitutes gained the freedom to give up prostitution. However, this mandate was ineffective because most of the prostitutes were bound by debt and had no means to repay it and thereafter change their employment. The government licensed prostitution only if prostitutes “chose” it as the means to make a living—yet for the poorest, there was no choice. While ostensibly discouraging it by criminalizing unlicensed street prostitution, while at the same time licensing the trade in brothels, the government in effect legalized prostitution by the poor. In addition to its ban on abortion for all women, the government sought to impose physical controls over the poorest women, who had no means to survive other than prostitution.39 Furthermore, the government regulated women’s civil, economic, and political rights universally, across all classes. First, the Political Assembly and

14  Chapter 1

Association Law (Shûkai Oyobi Seisha Hô) in 1890 prohibited women’s political activism, including organizing and participating in political meetings and belonging to political parties. This ordinance was revised in two clauses in Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hô) in 1900, in which the exclusion of women from political activism was restated. In addition, the government enacted the Meiji Civil Code in 1898, which was imbued with the Confucian family-state ideology: patriarchal authority in the household and imperial control over the state. In the family, the legal status of a married woman was equivalent to that of minors in that she was under her husband’s protection and authority. Through marriage, the wife was entered in the family register (koseki) of her husband, losing all control of her own property. A wife was able to sue for divorce in the case of maltreatment or desertion if a male relative supported her but not in the case of adultery.40 The Meiji government explicitly instituted misogynous, patriarchal policies for women. Japanese women’s problems regarding the law and the relationship between the private and the public are dealt with in more detail in Chapter 4. At the same time, in accordance with its militarization policies following the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the government planned to mobilize women for the national cause and induced upper-middle-class women to organize the Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujinkai) in 1901. The government thus attempted to divert women’s interest in social activism and substitute it with active participation in military assistance and propaganda; this was to be repeated in the late 1930s, as is explained in more detail in Chapter 5. Accordingly, the Patriotic Women’s Association provided aid and relief to war-bereaved families on the home front during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.41 In all of these ways, the Meiji government made the transformation from a feudal, Confucian-centered patriarchy led by a samurai class, which limited woman’s role to serving the male head of the family, to a modern, capitalist patriarchy that encompassed both Western and specifically Japanese patriarchal premises. These justified the practical use of women’s capacity for family management, labor, and reproduction. This was to be their contribution to the imperial state’s economy and power. Under this highly class- and gender-stratified society, women’s subjection to men became explicit, and women’s agency was minimized at best, making for difficult conditions in which to promote cross-class sisterhood. However, these gendered policies and the ideal of modernization were incompatible under the discourse of civilization, since one of the perceived prerequisites for an “advanced civilization” was the elevated position of

Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective  15

women, and women’s emancipation was regarded as a sign of the progress embedded in modernization in the West.42 Indeed, it was in this ambivalence at the heart of the version of modernization promoted by the government that Japanese middle-class feminists found an opening to develop a feminist consciousness.

Christian Social Activism and the Notion of the Women’s Rights Movement It was proselytizing Christians who brought Western liberal ideas about gender relations to Japan after the ban on Christianity was lifted in 1872. The government’s education policy for women in the early 1870s allowed Christian missionaries to found Christian schools for women, including Joshi-Gakuin (Girls’ School) in Tokyo, Ferris Seminary (renamed Ferris Japanese-English Girl’s School) in Yokohama, Baika Jogakkô (Baika Girls’ School) in Osaka, Kobe Home (renamed Kobe College) in Kobe, and Doshisha Jogakkô (Doshisha Girls’ School) in Kyoto. These Christian institutions provided an opportunity for those who studied there to experience an awakening to ideas about female equality.43 Before receiving education in Christian missionary schools, Japanese women had been taught under the influence of feudal ethics regarding women, such as those contained in Greater Learning for Women (Onna Daigaku). This was a book written in the early eighteenth century and was considered “the quintessential statement on the ideal Tokugawa woman.”44 In it, the author, Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714), prescribed misogynistic teachings, describing woman as a reproductive body for male heirs and characterizing women as stupid, disobedient, and malicious. He exhorted women to be chaste, diligent, and obedient to husband and son and to overlook a husband’s unfaithfulness.45 As the historian Sharon L. Sievers notes, although it is difficult to measure the influence of Greater Learning for Women outside the samurai class, its guiding principle, “respect the male; despise the female,” had become a well-entrenched social prescription by the early eighteenth century.46 Therefore, Christian ethics, which emphasized equality between the sexes, monogamy, and the sinfulness of adultery, were a fascinating eye-opener for the students of Christian schools. Such enlightening experiences nurtured among them what the historian Chino Yôichi calls “civic womanhood (shiminteki fujinkan),” a new womanhood that recognized women as citizens of the modern nation.47 This new ideal of womanhood showed Meiji-era women that they potentially shared certain rights and responsibilities as citizens in a modern society,

16  Chapter 1

despite their perspective being limited by their imposed position as secondclass citizens. Women’s Christian organizations, including the Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU; Nihon Fujin Kirisutokyô Kyô­ fûkai) and the Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan (YWCAJ; Kirisutokyô Joshi Seinenkai), founded in 1905, provided a space for grassroots social activism by Christian women.48 For example, Mary C. Leavitt of the World WCTU canvassed for organizing a branch in Tokyo. Impressed by Leavitt’s lecture on “woman’s responsibilities concerning alcoholism and immoral behavior in households,”49 Japanese Christian men and women organized the Tokyo WCTU branch. Its promoters included Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863–1942) of Meiji Girls’ School (Meiji Jogakkô); Tsuda Sen (1837–1908), a Christian educator and father of Tsuda Umeko; and Yajima Kajiko (1833–1925), who became the first director of the union. As a branch of the World WCTU, the JWCTU promoted temperance and sexual morality and led antiprostitution campaigns.50 Upon receiving a request from German peace activist Margarethe Lenore Selenka (1860–1922), it also sent a peace petition for the 1899 Hague Peace Conference.51 Upper- and middleclass Japanese women’s increasing enthusiasm for social activism could be seen in the fact that within one year of its inception, membership in the JWCTU nearly quadrupled from around 50 to 180.52 Their involvement in social activism via the union indicated that for these women, Christianity could serve as a common culture to facilitate social activism both nationally and internationally.53 In a sense, Christianity functioned as an intellectual and cultural salon where both believers and nonbelievers gained ideological impetus for social reform. “Meetings at a church satisfied my demand for culture,” claimed Yamanouchi Mina (1900–1990), a factory worker and one of the leaders of the Women’s Division of Yûaikai, a Christian origin labor organization.54 Church meetings held at the Unitarian church in Tokyo led her to understand the meaning of terms like “the slaves of capitalists” and “new women (atarashii onna).”55 Similarly, for Ichikawa Fusae (1893–1981), a labor union activist, the editor of the Yûaikai bulletin (Rôdôfujin, or Working Women), and a suffragist, the “Thursday Meeting” organized by Unitarian church men was the place to listen to current political issues.56 These examples indicate that Christianity could create a conduit for introducing “social questions” to the Japanese people, especially women, such as issues of sociopolitical and economic equality encompassing the labor movement. In particular, Christian social activism, which pursued universal equality and peace, allowed even Japanese women who were not affiliated

Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective  17

with Christian women’s organizations to develop an insight into larger social questions.57 Recognizing the influence of Christian social activism, one Christian suffragist member of the YWCAJ anonymously noted in 1938, “Christian women made a very great contribution in the past for they were pioneers in social work, women’s education, introduction of Christian ideals of home life and [the] interpretation of Western culture.”58 The fact that this statement was originally made in a speech delivered at the 1938 YWCA World Conference held in Canada and that the speaker went on to say that “a large number of the outstanding women leaders are Christian or of Christian background”59 suggests that the remark was the subjective view of a Christian woman. Nevertheless, the fact that it was published by the journal of the Women’s Suffrage League, Japanese Women, indicates that there was perhaps a general consensus among suffragists in the league about the significant role of Christian social activism in advancing the women’s rights movement. Equally important was that Christian women, in particular the first generation of Meiji-era Christian women, believed that there was no conflict between Christian social activism and nationalism. For example, Tsuda Umeko’s recognition of this and support for nationalism was clear when she wrote that “Christianity will only tend to strengthen the feeling of devotion to the country and to a cause.”60 Likewise, the JWCTU decided to support the 1899 International Peace Movement in the Hague by sending peace petitions, because JWCTU members believed that to respond to Western women’s requests for support was not only “good for women” but also good for “our duty for Japan.”61 In spite of its commitment to international peace, the JWCTU demonstrated its support for nationalism by sending small bags (imonbukuro) containing items for the use of soldiers at the front during the Russo-Japanese War.62 As these examples show, for these women, Christianity and nationalism were not contradictory. This was also the case for their male contemporaries, who were also determined to do what they saw as their Christian duty, albeit filtered through the influence of the prevalent discourse of civilization. The theological historian Doi Akio has pointed to an important reason for this: Meiji-era Christians were mostly from the former samurai class who supported nationalism. Some former samurai, would-be national leaders, believed the missionaries’ rhetoric that the spread of Christianity, more than anything else, could form the moral foundation for Japan to become a modern state on the Western imperial model. This accounted for the warm (if somewhat short-lived) reception that Christianity received from the state, which had ended by the 1880s.63 Demonstrating their effectiveness in a government-approved activity, thereby to an extent harmonizing Christian social activism with nationalism,

18  Chapter 1

was perhaps the women’s route to gain public recognition in a way that they hoped would counteract the marginalization of both women and Christianity, which were disregarded in wider Japanese society. In fact, the JWCTU was cautious about prioritizing the women’s rights movement as the core of their activism, even though leaders of the union recognized the importance of it. The union made ambiguous statements regarding women’s rights. Although noting that “it is our responsibility to try to promote women’s rights, since it is high time to empower women” and that “it is most important to redress past grievances,” it nevertheless insisted that “however, western customs must not be envied, emulated nor accepted as a whole, in doing so.”64 These women promoted a particular kind of social activism that was suffused with their understanding of the prevailing ethos of the era. Naturally, many different motivations coexisted in the foundation of Christian women’s social activism, including this initial choice to conform to Japanese social norms. However the next generation of leaders of the JWCTU, including Gauntlett (née Yamada) Tsune (1873–1953) participated more fully in the women’s rights movement.65 Christian social activism in Japan was situated very differently from that in the United States. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American Protestants, in particular the proponents of the Social Gospel, had a profound influence on American society and culture in promoting social reforms in urban, industrial America. The Social Gospel ethos provided a unifying theological foundation for social and political reforms targeting issues including poverty, disease, public hygiene, and sexual behavior.66 In addition, Christian social activist organizations like the WCTU addressed a wide range of social issues, including suffrage, prison reform, improving women’s working conditions, peace, and social purity.67 In Japan, the JWCTU promoted social reform selectively because it was from a very different legal and cultural framework. Japanese upper- and middle-class Christian women leaders, with the means to gain knowledge of WCTU precedents for social reform, were some of the initiators in promoting women’s rights. But unlike the earlier Freedom and People’s Rights movement, these Christian women emphasized their conformity to prevailing norms of patriarchal control and societal ideals rather than desire for active social transformation. Although Japanese Christian women were among the pioneers of the women’s rights movement, they were also under the influence of a restrictive gender code derived from statist thought and made rigid by an increasingly nationalistic and militaristic sociopolitical climate that was legally and educationally resistant to the influence of both women and Christianity.68

Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective  19

This gender code was mirrored inside churches, where patriarchal control also restricted women from finding linkages with other women. Under men’s leadership, the purposes of women’s organizations were defined as the insular roles of cultivating the faith of members and raising funds to support churches. By 1938 an article was reporting that church women felt that “there is, therefore, little connection between church women’s and other women’s organizations, nor is there any interest or urge for them to go outside of the church.”69 As a result, rather than promoting radical social reform, they felt “cut off from society,” causing some women to leave the church to pursue their interest in social reform movements.70 Thus, although Japanese Christian women were among the pioneers of the women’s rights movement and had participated enthusiastically in international exchange, it is important to note that support from the Christian hierarchy was limited.

Social Questions and Socialist Women In addition to members of Christian women’s organizations, some enlightened former samurai-class men, such as the educational theorist and influential Westernizer Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), supported the notion of women’s rights. Yet these men’s aim in supporting women’s rights was generally to protect and increase their own class privilege; it was a discourse limited to the middle and upper classes that did not branch out and encompass women from other classes.71 On the other hand, socialists who supported gender equality and women’s rights as part of universal equality envisioned a substantial change of the whole social structure, including addressing injustice and the oppression of women in classes other than their own.72 For example, Fukuda Hideko published the socialist women’s newspaper Sekai Fujin (Women of the World) between 1907 and 1909, along with socialist men, including Ishikawa Sanshirô (1876–1956), a Christian socialist, member of the Commoners’ Society (Heiminsha), and Fukuda’s de facto husband, and Abe Isoo (1865–1949), a Christian socialist.73 In Women of the World, Fukuda called for the elimination of all shackles on Japanese women, including laws, customs, and ethics, to achieve women’s absolute freedom.74 She identified the purpose of the paper as its being a precursor of the w ­ omen’s movement in Japan.75 Moreover, as the title of the paper implied, Fukuda linked Japanese women’s liberation with that of women of the world as she emphasized in the subheading, “This paper advocates internationalism and focuses on women’s emancipation.”76 Fukuda’s paper carried articles on both domestic and international topics, including on the Western women’s suffrage movement.77

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Socialist women of the Commoners’ Society (Heiminsha), including Sakai Tameko (1872–1959) and Nishikawa Fumiko (1882–1960), were other supporters of universal women’s rights. They were instrumental in the movement “to free women politically”78 and held consciousness-raising seminars, which laid the foundations for petitioning the parliament in 1905 for repeal of Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law. The first clause of Article 5 prohibited women from being members of political parties, and the second clause prohibited women from attending political meetings, speaking on political matters in public, and promoting political meetings. No women could vote.79 As these examples indicate, the version of women’s rights supported by socialist women was inclusive and had the potential to link all women across lines of class and nationality. However, there were severe difficulties in promoting a women’s rights movement for these socialist women. Because of their broader perspective of social change based on universal equality, and in particular, their promotion of the labor movement, which was seen as a challenge to the Meiji government’s modernizing policies, socialist women were constantly persecuted. In 1911, twelve people were accused of plotting to assassinate the emperor in the Great Treason Trial (Taigyaku Jiken Shinri) and were later executed, including the woman writer and activist Kanno Suga (1881–1911).80 This not only hindered communication between ­middle-class and socialist feminists but also made the promotion of a strong women’s rights movement in Meiji-era Japan very difficult.81 Thus, any drastic and inclusive social reform was marginalized. Without what Vera Mackie calls “suitable models for political activity, particularly, oppositional political activity,”82 Japanese feminists lacked strategies with which to liberate themselves that were sufficiently flexible and achievable under the master narrative of modernization. However, after Japan’s rise to imperial power following the First SinoJapanese War (1894–1895), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), and World War I (1914–1918), a new phase began in the development of the women’s rights movement in Japan. Government emphasis on creating an advanced civilization continued between the world wars, albeit selectively. On the one hand, “its military and naval might approached world standard,”83 which along with rapid advances in sophisticated engineering and industrialization increased national pride. On the other hand, entry into modern nationhood highlighted the fatal rigidity of Meiji nationalism; other powers were in some cases moving gradually toward new standards of civilization, including arms limitations. Although by the turn of the century women’s suffrage was achieved in Australasia, New Zealand, and some states in the United States, and the recognition of women’s rights was increasing

Laying the Foundations for an International Feminist Perspective  21

in some places, including the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zea­ land,84 in comparison Japan confined its women to a far more inferior posi­ tion in the social structure. These illogical gaps in Japan’s progress indicated unbridgeable differences between it and the West, which in turn increased the latter’s worries about the possible threat to international security from Japan’s expansionist ambitions. This coincided with Western feminists beginning to expand the feminist movement internationally, carrying with them their own agendas. As their efforts combined with those of Japanese feminists, Japan became a juncture for trying to achieve a common notion of civilization and a focal point for the international feminist movement.

2

“Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook” The Development of Cross-cultural Contacts, 1902–1930 Others may theorise about the woman movement, but to us has been vouchsafed positive knowledge. Once, this movement represented the scattered and disconnected protests of individual women. In that period women as a whole were blinded by ignorance, because society denied them education; they were compelled to silence, for society forbade them to speak. They struggled against their wrongs singly and alone, for society forbade them to organize; they dwelt in poverty, for the law denied them the control of property, and even the collection of wages. . . . [T]here has emerged a present-day movement possessing a clear understanding and a definite, positive purpose. Carrie Chapman Catt, “Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?”

T

his chapter deals with the development of feminist consciousness among Japanese women up to 1930 and how ideas from and cooperation with Western feminists were vital for the development of the wider organized women’s movement in Japan. Before exploring the major themes in exchanges over this period, it is useful to look at how one woman saw the situation for Japanese women in 1920. In June 1920, Jus Suffragii (International Woman Suffrage News), the journal of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, carried an article based

Parts of this chapter were previously published in Taeko Shibahara, “‘The Private League of Nations’: The Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference and Japanese Feminists in 1928,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 41 (2011): 3–24; Taeko Shibahara, “Through Americanized Japanese Woman’s Eyes: Tsuda Umeko and the Women’s Movement in Japan in the 1910s,” Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 1, no. 2 (May 2010): 225–234; and Taeko Shibahara, “‘Not Only for the Welfare of the Nation but for the World and Humanity’: The Interwar Suffrage Movement in Japan,” Journal of Women’s History 24, no.2 (Summer 2012): 62–68. Copyright © 2012 Journal of Women’s History. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.

“Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook”  23

on an interview with Miss Shidachi, a Japanese student at the University of London. When the interviewer questioned her about “the exact position of women in a country [Japan] where as yet they have no political existence,” Shidachi pointed out that “the whole idea of citizen rights for women was still in its infancy.” She explained that, despite its Westernizing policies, the government continued to maintain feudal patriarchal customs. Not only did workers not have the right to unite and most people not have the right to vote, but the government also maintained an education policy for women aimed at creating “good wives and wise mothers.” The influence of this policy and slogan were so strong that “even in the Christian schools the Government motto finds favor,” encouraging women to regard themselves as “not full human beings” but as “beings created for the service of man.” The result of this misogynist education policy was that as “women grow out of childhood they marry husbands they have probably never seen, or they enter a sweat industry and toil as wage slaves.” Consequently, for Shidachi, Japanese women were “perhaps, of all women, the most miserable.”1 Shidachi’s intense sentiment expressed with painful precision the discrepancy between the political visibility of British women and the lack of it for Japanese women. British women had achieved limited suffrage in 1918 after struggling fiercely for it since the late nineteenth century. At the time of Shidachi’s interview in 1920, experiencing social chaos in the aftermath of World War I, Western feminists (including British ones) were concerned about how to use women’s political power to promote their socioeconomic rights, and how to create a representative body of women in the League of Nations.2 Their efforts were based on the desire to establish a fair and peaceful society.3 After her galvanizing encounter with British feminists, Shidachi was determined to “return to her own country, carrying with her new ideals and a new outlook, and interpreting these new ideals to her country.”4 Shidachi was one of dozens of middle-class Japanese women with crosscultural contacts who developed critical insights into the double standards of Japan’s modern patriarchy. Women’s activism in Japan, which had begun in the late nineteenth century, was not dormant until 1920. However, these later cross-cultural contacts helped Japanese feminists decide to develop the women’s rights movement in Japan by applying Western feminists’ methods and ideologies selectively—tailoring them in ways that would meet Japanese sociocultural conditions.5 In parallel with Japanese feminists’ efforts, Western feminists also began to develop the women’s rights movement within a transcultural framework. Organizations established included the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), renamed the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage

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and Equal Citizenship (IAWSEC) in 1926, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In the United States, domestic women’s organizations, including the League of Women Voters (LWV) and the National Woman’s Party (NWP), collaborated with the international women’s organizations, as well as independently promoting the internationalization of feminism. These were run and supported by a number of prominent activists such as Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958), Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947), Jane Addams (1860–1935), and Alice Paul (1885–1987). Birth control crusader Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) also joined the international movement for birth control. From the perspective of these leaders, women had a particular social responsibility to create a humanitarian civilization, one in which people would be able to meet their needs and satisfy their desire for peace and welfare based on cooperation, not conflict. Women also had common interests as women, regardless of national and cultural differences flowing from things like religion, language, and social customs. In furtherance of these beliefs, contacts between women reformers and Japanese women were well established by the 1920s.6 Nonetheless, different perceptions about women’s roles in society impeded the progress of communication between women in different cultures. As Shidachi indicated, under the controlling influence of the official view of women in the era, for most, Japanese women’s role was limited to that of wife and mother in the home, or that of low-waged laborer. That this was true is confirmed by a survey conducted by the Tokyo city government in 1920. It found that the number of women working outside the home in the city, including manual and nonmanual labor, was only 137,373 out of a total population of 2,173, 200. The total workforce in Tokyo stood at 908,442. Men accounted for 82.18 percent of this and women 13.71 percent. The survey claimed, “The majority of women did not have a job [other than homemaking], which relegated them to a subservient position in society.”7 Similarly, according to a national survey conducted by the central Japanese government in 1920, the total workforce stood at 49 percent of the population, and among this men accounted for 61 percent and women for 37 percent of workers.8 In the case of women workers, both employers and women employees accepted the idea that retirement upon marriage was a common practice.9 Although this home-centered role allowed women to connect indirectly with society through their relations with specific males, and with the state through the family-state ideology, it did not encourage them to develop a full sense of citizenship. It also impeded women from creating a strong and cohesive cross-class and cross-cultural community.

“Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook”  25

In like fashion, for women in the West, the civilization discourse impeded equal reciprocal communications with non-Western women. As the Western discourse stereotyped other cultures as being less developed, it led Western women to teach that their own values were superior to those of others, and blunted their interest in learning from international contacts. This overbearing attitude prevented women from achieving mutual respect and friendship. “We realize that hitherto the Western Peoples have attempted to impose their theories of life and civilization upon the East,” members of WILPF confessed in 1927. And so they “have been blind to the spiritual and intellectual wealth of the Eastern Peoples.”10 Direct face-to-face contact was necessary, in part to bridge these cultural differences. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the fires that came in its wake destroyed or damaged almost three-quarters of the buildings in Tokyo and killed more than a hundred thousand people.11 This catastrophe not only awakened Japanese women to the pressing need for social activism and voluntary efforts to improve the lives of women but also shook Western women from their cultural complacency and caused them to participate in what was, by that time, increasingly secular international feminism. Japanese women launched relief work for earthquake survivors. Determined to “rise” were those women who had lamented “women’s uselessness in society arising from the lack of responsibility and duty” and who had “deplored the society that nurtured such a sense of women’s uselessness through education.”12 In the light of their determination to work for the welfare of earthquake survivors, Mary Ritter Beard—the feminist historian and social justice activist, who visited Tokyo with her husband, Charles Beard (1874–1948), the historian and political scientist—supported these Japanese women face-to-face by giving them advice on social work. On her return to America she organized a book-sending project to help Tokyo’s women form a women’s library. Mary Ritter Beard appealed to the readers of the Woman Citizen, noting, “We could at least indulge in a unique and friendly international feminist act by sending them the best of the English literature dealing with the history of women, their social and intellectual struggles, their public works, and their manifold interests. The gift should include books and pamphlets on social work, the labor problem, summaries of Western social legislation, and Western criticism of modern civilization.”13 This practical, hands-on action by Japanese women in 1923 to improve the daily lives and living environments of survivors through relief work was a unilateral, instinctive reaction to a dire need. Western models did not prompt it, which was important, for it was this confidence-building independent usefulness, combined with direct contact with foreign feminists and

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theoretical exchange, along with the New Women’s Association, which had been active from 1919 to 1922, and the partial repeal of Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law in 1922, that created the conditions that eventually led to the formation of the Women’s Suffrage League. In the opinion of Mary Ritter Beard, the unity created by the joint efforts at earthquake relief was the most significant factor in the initiation of the league.14 Both the lack of voting rights and the attempts from outside by Western women to seek international women’s alliances galvanized Western and Japanese feminists alike to pursue women’s universal liberation from modern patriarchal control. Japanese women reformers recognized that “woman suffrage was of paramount importance for effectively addressing issues of women’s rights, as well for dealing with larger social problems,”15 since the vote was the lawful means to participate in decision making in the modern, constitutional state. Nevertheless, unlike their Western counterparts, few Japanese middle-class feminists in the 1910s prioritized the suffrage movement. Rather, as is discussed in Chapter 3, they sought ways to organize an association for the promotion of peace, on the condition of a limited participation in the international women’s peace movement: a movement that included support of women’s suffrage. Applying Western feminists’ discourses toward an understanding of women’s rights in familial, national, and international spheres, Japanese middle-class feminists negotiated within their own sociopolitical culture.

Awakening International Feminist Discourse and the IWSA, 1902–1920 In 1902, Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947), then president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and several other American suffragists called for an international conference of suffragists in Washington, D.C.16 This conference led to the formation of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Berlin in 1904, led by five national associations from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Norway, and the Netherlands. Such rapid transnational growth of the IWSA indicates that suffrage was a political demand that bridged substantial differences, facilitating the growth of an international women’s rights movement in the early twentieth century. Following this campaign, in 1906 four other national suffrage associations from Canada, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden affiliated with the IWSA. It continued to grow, and by 1914 it counted twenty-six auxiliary national associations covering five continents.17 For the IWSA, its wider, face-to-face internationalization began when its president, Catt, and the Dutch feminist Aletta Jacobs (1854–1929) traveled

“Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook”  27

to nations and colonies in Europe, Africa, and Asia, including stops in Japan for suffrage campaigns in 1911 and 1912.18 Such direct contacts with Asian women, combined with research about Asian women’s movements, probably helped the IWSA to realize that “woman’s cause is the same throughout the world”19 and that the alliance between Western and Eastern women would enable a fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas. As a result, at the 1913 Budapest Conference, the IWSA amended its constitution to include women’s rights committees in Asian nations. It also admitted the national branch of the Chinese Woman Suffrage Association as a member. Behind this internationalization was the IWSA’s new recognition of the necessity for women’s alliance beyond cultural differences, and its growing realization that committees in Asian nations could eventually develop into suffrage groups that would give valuable support to the IWSA in return.20 Indeed, the IWSA members strongly identified with women’s struggle for what they called “the woman movement”21 in different cultures. For example, they empathized with Chinese women’s struggle, noting in Jus Suffragii in May 1914, “We often have said to each other, our struggle for liberty seems to us now easy, in comparison with what these women have to overcome.”22 Chinese women’s struggle in their own male-dominated milieu seemed little different except in degree from those occurring in many Western nations, and this comparative contextualization encouraged the IWSA women, informing their efforts toward the piecemeal achievement of suffrage. By 1913, New Zealand had approved women’s right to vote, Australia had approved it with some restrictions, and Finland and Norway had approved full women’s suffrage. The following year, eleven states in the United States followed suit.23 Undoubtedly Catt believed that such women’s movements and their achievements in different nations were the seed for a larger women’s rights movement that would share roots with, and grow out of, the suffrage movement. In this context, Catt emphasized the transnational nature of suffrage by comparing it with the women’s movement in general. For Catt, ­women’s struggle against male oppression had everywhere led to the rise of “the woman movement,” which was a corollary of the progress of human history regardless of historical and cultural differences. To promote a strong women’s movement, women’s alliances were necessary, for as she observed, under such traditional “conditions of sexual serfdom, what wonder that their cries for justice were stifled, and that their protests never reached the ears of the men.”24 Thus, the very fact that women shared the condition of being disenfranchised, in what Catt called “constitutionally organized independent nations,” paradoxically facilitated the formation of alliances aiming to promote

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a strong women’s rights movement nationally and internationally. Catt ­declared: This [women’s] modern movement demands political rights for women. It demands a direct influence for women upon the legislation which concerns the common welfare of all the people. It recognises the vote as the only dignified and honorable means of securing recognition of their needs and aspirations.25 Despite the fact that the vote was the only lawful tool to achieve fairness and equality in society, women were excluded from this privilege by birth. Only if women had the vote could they exert direct influence to create change. Of course, suffrage meant the attainment of political equality and individual rights for each woman. Importantly, IWSA members believed that women could also realize their “needs and aspirations” through the vote. As Catt indicated, these needs and aspirations were primarily seen as ones that concerned “the common welfare of all the people” but that male politicians neglected. This attitude was also reflected in the May 1914 issue of Jus Suffragii: “Woman wishes to carry woman’s voice into public life, because she knows that this voice will plead for human suffering and human striving, which at present have none to plead for them.”26 This specific sense of social responsibility to humanity as a whole shaped an inclusive worldview among the IWSA women, which was expressed in their internationalism. Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs visited Japan in 1912 and met prominent Japanese women. In her diary Catt wrote, “All three [Catt, Jacobs, and their traveling companion Mrs. McVey] went to Tokyo and lunched at the Imperial with sixteen Japanese ladies by their invitation. After the lunch we gathered in a parlor and I made a speech, telling them what I wanted— and got the promise of a report—and perhaps of a delegate.”27 Tsuda Umeko was at the meeting and agreed to send a report about progress toward suffrage in Japan. This was despite her view at the time that the ground was not yet prepared for Japanese women’s suffrage to be effective. Tsuda Umeko (1864–1929) was one of the five Japanese girl students sent to America by the Meiji government in 1871 to study and be educated as a teacher. She came back to Japan in 1882 and started to teach at the Peeress School in 1885. From 1889 to 1892, Tsuda studied at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and in 1900 she founded a girls’ school in Japan, Joshi Eigaku Juku.28 It is clear from Japanese women leaders’ qualified support for the IWSA that middle-class Japanese women at least, especially those with such broad

“Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook”  29

experience, readily reciprocated the internationalist worldview; the discourse of the suffrage movement was already acting as a cross-cultural bridge for the women’s rights movement. Acknowledging this, Annie Furuhjelm (1859–1937), a Finnish suffragist, wrote of the need for “one big thing to bind the whole together, and give it a solid foundation, and this big thing was Suffrage—Suffrage as a means to an end, the enfranchisement of womanhood.”29 The IWSA’s strong sense of leadership in propagating the suffrage discourse to Asian women inevitably contained a Eurocentric element, given that the era’s discourse of civilization emphasized the superiority of Western culture in general and, of particular relevance here, in the degree of equality between the sexes. That hint of peremptory instruction in Catt’s “telling them what I wanted” was echoed in an editorial note in the Jus Suffragii of July 1913: “We must make them [Asiatic women] clearly understand that the woman’s cause is the same throughout the world.”30 This message implies ambivalence amongst the IWSA’s Western women. On the one hand, they tended to stereotype Asian women as younger, less aware sisters. On the other, they recognized the overriding need to create what Catt called in 1914 “a present-day movement possessing a clear understanding and a definite, positive purpose.”31 Regardless of the class and race preconceptions of the day, gender alliance was understood to be a necessary tool to enable the suffrage movement to gain access to electoral power. At the same time that the suffrage cause gave impetus to the international women’s movement, the looming threat of World War I promised to critically divide the movement, as many Western nations were divided into two power blocs by military alliances: the Central Powers, including Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the Allied Powers, including Britain, France, and the United States. The women in each were forced to prioritize either national interests or women’s universal interests. Alert to this problem, the first vice president of the IWSA, the British suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929) called in September 1914 for unity among the national branches. “We are faced by the disruption, the animosity, the misunderstanding caused by war: but all the same, notwithstanding the cruel strain, we must firmly resolve to hold our International Alliance together.”32 In the face of the world crisis, the gaining of suffrage gave strong direction to the era’s women’s movement. In fact, the IWSA had issued an “International Manifesto of Women” to the British Foreign Office and to foreign embassies in London with the outbreak of hostilities in July 1914. In the manifesto, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the recording secretary, Chrystal Macmillan

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(1872–1932), stated that “we, realising our responsibilities as the mothers of the race, cannot stand passive[ly] by,” and concluded: The International Women’s Suffrage Alliance with the object of obtaining our political means of sharing with men the power which shapes the fate of nations, appeal to you to leave untried no method of conciliation or arbitration for arranging international differences which may help to avert deluging half the civilized world in blood.33 For the IWSA’s members, the exercise of women’s political power originated in women’s concern for the betterment of society. Moreover, united by their common role as mothers, they had a unique ability to promote international reconciliation. This, they argued, contrasted sharply with the direction of male power politics: while male power destroyed civilization, women’s power created it. To articulate the linkage of motherhood, suffrage, and peace was significant for IWSA women. This linkage meant women who were primarily perceived as domestic caregivers were in fact in charge of social and community action. Social and community action led women to recognize their political power. As Mary Ritter Beard had emphasized in 1912, “Everything that counts in the common life is political.”34 Women’s daily action derived from “mothercraft,” that is, skills and knowledge to provide good care of children, and it was from this basis alone that civilization was created. The recognition that “motherhood” was a social ideal that bridged action between “private” and “public” meant to those suffragists that the enfranchisement of women was inevitable. Consequently, the IWSA’s “International Manifesto of Women” distinctively characterized women as a transnational body, even in the midst of the crisis of war. While men, as the citizens of nations, worked within the framework of national interests, women’s interests transcended national bound­ aries. The manifesto declared that being a woman meant not only being a mother of children but also being an organic, international link—made of “women of twenty-six countries, having banded our selves together in the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance”35 —to promote peace and the welfare of human society. However, the suffrage movement was temporarily taken over by wartime social activism of a practical nature. Under wartime pressure, the IWSA suspended one element of its cause, “peace and suffrage.” Accordingly, the IWSA congress scheduled for Berlin in 1915 was canceled, and it was not until 1920 that the IWSA resumed its international congresses.36 In fact, as

“Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook”  31

Fawcett wrote to the national branches in September 1914, “Headquarters Committee have undertaken to extend help of various kinds to the large numbers of foreign women left stranded and in some cases penniless and friendless in London because of the war.” The war chaos led European suffragists to work together in immediate wartime social activism, including relief and charity works for war refugees.37 Also these women were charged with fulfilling their roles and responsibilities as citizens in their home countries, despite their lack of full citizenship rights. Catt, for example, focused her energies on NAWSA, which decided to support the U.S. government in the case of U.S. intervention in the war.38 These facts indicate the difficulties involved in promoting the suffrage movement transnationally during the war. Accordingly the IWSA decided to act jointly with an International Women’s Relief Committee led by British suffragists Chrystal Macmillan and Mary Sheepshanks (1872–1960).39 In contrast, some leaders of the IWSA, including Aletta Jacobs and Chrystal Macmillan, held the Women’s Peace Congress at The Hague in 1915, which led Western pacifist women to organize a women’s international peace organization, the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP) (renamed the Wom­ en’s International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF] in 1919).40 The war had strangled the IWSA activism, and the aftermath of the conflict was a bitter peace, characterized powerfully by Mary Sheepshanks in 1918 as “bereavement, mutilation, blindness, madness, disease, and despair, in spite of heroism, patriotism, and humble devotion.”41 Nevertheless, the strong determination to take active roles in society and battle against the social injustice caused by the absence of women’s vote in politics led these suffragists to firmly resolve to strengthen women’s alliances to pursue political, social, and economic rights. In promoting women’s causes, they sharply criticized a false rhetoric in the discourse of civilization: Mary Sheepshanks in the same article recognized the hollowness of Western claims to civilization and exhorted that “the ghastly horror to which selfish and one-sided governments have led ‘civilized’ Europe (and which have involved hundreds of thousands of ‘uncivilized’ Africans and Asiatics in the general destruction) must spurt women to claim their full share in making a better world.”42 In so doing, such women articulated that women’s goal in taking part in politics was to make society inclusive, internationally cooperative, and peaceful, in a way that solely male Western governments, the proud leaders of “civilization,” had disastrously failed to do. It was with this ethos that the IWSA women embarked on activism in the years between World War I and World War II. Beginning with the

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Eighth Congress of the IWSA in Geneva in 1920, the range of discussion and action plans expanded to cover many issues, including the work of women in national and local governments; women and political parties; civil, economic, and moral equality; and women’s employment and the idea of a motherhood pension. To deal with suffrage issues the congress decided to establish two sections in the alliance: one for unenfranchised women and one for the enfranchised, thus seeking a way to link women’s issues in states with and without the vote, while simultaneously dealing with the distinct needs arising from different situations.43 The IWSA women also regarded the League of Nations, begun in 1919, as an important arbiter for gender issues around the world because of women’s common oppression. They saw the creation of the League of Nations as a huge experiment in creating a global, humanitarian civilization—precisely the values of their own organization.44 Although they were not at first included, women’s groups pressed to be represented in the League of Nations, and this bore fruit, for example in the 1921 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, discussed later in this chapter. With a vision beyond suffrage, the IWSA women identified a new era of tasks and responsibilities to create a humanitarian civilization that encompassed the family, nationhood, and the world. This is not to say that they overlooked animosity between the former belligerents. On the contrary, IWSA women supported the congress’s resolutions and the League of Nations precisely because of the emotional and material sufferings caused by the War.45 Thus, with a newly acquired identity, one of the feminists noted, “the Congress was important, not so much for what it did and said, interesting as that was, as for the mere fact of its existence. For it was an actual and visible proof of that sudden development of our civilization by which the women of all nations have suddenly been called into council, and it marked the first steps of their new international co-operation.”46

Different Perceptions about Women’s Roles in Society: The IWSA Dialogue with Japanese Educators The encounter between IWSA’s “International” action and Japanese women social activists can be said to have started in 1911—one year earlier than Catt’s and Jacobs’s actual visit to Japan—when the IWSA made contact with Japanese women educators, including Tsuda Umeko and Hatoyama Haruko (1861–1938), who can perhaps be seen as reflecting the views of many educators, who were in most cases middle- or upper-class women.47 The IWSA sent letters to these notable women asking Japan to send representatives to

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the IWSA Stockholm Conference in 1911. However, Tsuda and Hatoyama declined to support the conference because, as they explained, unlike developed Western nations, Japan in their view was not yet ready for woman’s suffrage. Tsuda explained specifically that she thought that Japanese women lacked the civic education required to make them understand the meaning of their votes. As a result, she concluded, a rash decision to support the suffrage campaign might result in an “adverse effect for women.”48 By “adverse effect,” Tsuda possibly meant that male voters might manipulate that women’s vote because women did not receive a proper education that would enable them to participate in politics. Hatoyama was born into a samurai family in Nagano prefecture and received her higher education in Tokyo. She was one of the founders of Kyôritsu Joshi Shokugyô Gakkô (Kyôritsu Women’s Vocational School) in 1886. Hatoyama staunchly advocated the official view of womanhood, “good wife and wise mother,” and saw highquality education for women as a way of bolstering this. Such differences in conceptions between Western and middle-class Japanese women leaders in the early 1910s of women’s roles in society made it difficult to promote the women’s rights movement internationally between Japan and the West. In general, like Hatoyama, Japanese women educators promoted the official view of ideal womanhood: “good wife and wise mother.” They emphasized that women’s roles were primarily in the family, and the virtue of the Japanese woman lay in her self-sacrificing, supportive role in the domestic sphere. Hatoyama explained her refusal to support women’s suffrage by noting that “in Japan, to require women’s suffrage was inconceivable. I believe there is no other urgent need but to become an ideal wife, mother, and mother-in-law who could play such suitable roles as were required in this new era of Taishô [1912–1926].”49 Hatoyama was not alone in her views. Many women educators, including Shimoda Utako (1854–1936), former dean of the Peeress School and founder of Jissen Girls’ School, a school for girls from middle- and w ­ orking-class families, promoted women’s higher education based on the notion of traditional Japanese womanhood. However, within that limitation they also recognized that women were able to improve their social status through modern education. Importantly, too, to promote education, they did not blindly copy Western ideas or completely reject Japan’s traditional culture. For example, Shimoda wrote in a 1915 essay titled “The Virtues of Japanese Womanhood”: In order to adopt the methods of foreign countries of different manners, customs, and habits, we should first carefully examine them

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before we decide to adopt them. We should not decide recklessly. We have peculiar race characteristics of our own.50 By referring to “peculiar race characteristics of our own,” Shimoda advocated incorporating traditional Japanese cultural values into women’s education, in order to defend Japanese culture. She continued, “The honor of the Japanese woman is that she becomes a virtuous wife and a good mother. She is fit to be the queen of her household, and not the queen of society.” Yet the Western civilizing discourse stereotyped precisely this role as “confined,” and saw it as an indication of the backwardness of Japan’s civilization. In response, Shimoda argued that such a “confined” condition was, in fact, Japanese women’s chosen way of advancing civilization. For Shimoda, Japanese women’s public roles were performed by staying in the domestic sphere. “Who, then, can say that the typical Japanese woman’s sphere of activity was confined in being a virtuous wife and a good mother, or that she is not fit to be a great social factor?”51 Clearly, not only did she refute the stereotyped image of Japanese women but she also challenged the master narrative of the discourse of civilization. By defending “peculiar” Japanese womanhood and its unique qualities, Shimoda argued that cultural differences were not ranked in hierarchical order. Japanese women educators like Shimoda thus promoted the “good wives and wise mothers” notion of womanhood as providing the ideal public roles for Japanese women, and supported the family-state ideology established by the Meiji government. Mary Ritter Beard recognized Japanese women educators’ strategies to promote women’s education under the increasing tensions between the influx of Western liberal ideologies, including gender equality, and traditional Japanese moral and gender codes. She observed in her 1953 book The Force of Women in Japanese History that “amid the tendency lightly to adopt Western customs and ideas, efforts were made, early in the [Meiji] Restoration era, by several Japanese women to defend traditional native philosophies with the object of stabilizing young women for their protection against easy acceptances of the strange foreign manners and customs.”52 Her two visits to Japan in 1922 and 1923 and her friendship with women leaders, including conservative educators like Shimoda and Atomi Kakei (1846–1926) led her to this insight.53 Like other educators, Tsuda did not officially support women’s suffrage. However, she had a different idea about women’s roles in society than many of her counterparts. She was perhaps more ambivalent and worried about the influence of traditional Japanese ideal womanhood than they, because she had been educated in America for more than ten years and had absorbed

“Carrying with Her New Ideals and a New Outlook”  35

liberal ideas. For Tsuda, patriarchal control over women did confine them to a subordinate position in society, and at the same time, women’s personality and identity were stifled by the ideology of the “ideal woman.” Tsuda wrote in 1913 that “Japanese women under the old ethical codes have led, many of them, pure, noble, unselfish lives of devotion; but their virtues were passive, they lack breath, fire, life.”54 In her analysis, what people admired as Japanese women’s femininity was, in fact, the result of gender oppression. Tsuda pointed out that the central problem of “ideal womanhood” for each woman was that “her identity was merged in that of father, husband, or some male relative.”55 Middle- and upper-class women, who were largely the focus of this ideal, had no means to define and delineate themselves other than via relationships with men. Consequently women in the privileged class, who were prevented from full participation in society and largely alienated from society and from women of other classes as well, were not able to overcome the barriers embedded in gendered policies.56

Propagating Western Knowledge about Women’s Social Activism in the 1910s Of course, short of revolution, middle-class Japanese women felt they could challenge patriarchal control only by negotiating within the existing sociopolitical culture. The discourse of civilization was a useful tool in this. For example, Tsuda used women’s education to challenge patriarchal institutions, declaring that “real progress is impossible while the growth is all [on] one side, and Japan cannot take a high stand [achieve a high standing] until the women, as well as men, are educated.”57 She took practical steps to make this happen: unlike many other women’s schools, which functioned as finishing schools, in her school Tsuda aimed to produce economically and psychologically independent women. Toward this objective, Tsuda chose to promote education based on Christian social activism. For Tsuda, “the ethical side of Christianity” was significant in enlightening her students, because it encompassed “the wider view of social duties.”58 In her understanding, Christian ethics were a resource for women’s social activism because they promulgated the duty of all people to care for society’s less fortunate members. She had also seen that American women in the Social Gospel movement, such as Jane Addams, had moved out from the private to the public sphere via social activism and consequently had been able to have some influence in politics. By adopting a similar strategy, Tsuda expected that women’s education based on Christianity would lead her students to initiate social activism.

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In turn, such women would gain self-esteem and liberation from the old restrictive ethics. In this way, through education, Tsuda planned to enlighten her students, who could then serve as leaders to implement social reform, and to challenge the double standards employed to deal with women. Nevertheless, most women were left under the strong influence of conservative education policies, and the success of Tsuda’s efforts to enlighten women was limited. To bridge the knowledge gap, some feminists organized women’s groups and used their magazines to publicize the idea of women’s liberation. For example, feminist writer Hiratsuka Raichô (1886–1971) organized a literary group, the Blue-stocking Society (Seitôsha) in 1911 and published its journal, the Blue-Stocking (Seitō). Aimed at a middle-class audience, Seitō focused on women’s liberation from traditional womanhood and included articles by Japanese women and by Western writers in translation. The latter included review essays by G. B. Shaw and Janet Lee about Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.59 Hiratsuka edited the journal in a way that encouraged readers to recognize women’s creative talents and their right to control their sexuality.60 In contrast, a former socialist, Nishikawa Fumiko, dealt with the political and economic liberation of women. To this end, Nishikawa organized the New True Women Association (Shin Shin Fujinkai) in 1913 and published the journal New True Women (Shin Shin Fujin) until 1923.61 To disseminate Western feminists’ ideas, Shin Shin Fujin also carried translated articles written by Western feminists, such as Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour and M. Carey Thomas’s “The Theory of Women’s Suffrage.” The articles analyzed women’s position in society as being universally low. Yet in both of these journals, Western feminists indicated that women were not simply accepting such inferior positions in society but rather struggling against oppression, seeking economic and political liberation, and escaping patriarchal control. Tsuda herself was somewhat anxious about the influence of these more political and Westernizing feminists’ articles, like those from Schreiner and Thomas, musing in 1915 that “it is a strange period of change, and we wonder what the results will be of so many varied and incongruous elements of thought mixed together.”62 Nevertheless, if requests for subscriptions, membership, and advice sent to Seitō are anything to go by, the Western feminists’ articles were popular among women.63 Such women’s magazines thus disseminated the ideas of women’s rights, as well as serving as a forum for Japanese feminists in the 1910s. Their readers, otherwise limited in access to Western feminists’ ideas, were able to nurture a feminist consciousness.

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The Problem of Unity in the Women’s Rights Movement in Early 1920s Japan The development of a feminist consciousness in the 1910s was one more in a succession of women’s rights movements that had been promoted by feminists since the late nineteenth century, as seen in the previous chapter. In the 1920s, further diverse women’s groups became vehicles for the women’s rights movement; with such varied antecedents, it is not surprising that Japanese feminists found unity difficult to achieve. New organizations active in the early 1920s included a middle-class women’s group, the New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai), founded in 1919; the Red Wave Society (Sekirankai), a socialist women’s group organized in 1921; and the w ­ omen’s suffrage group of the Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union ( JWCTU) called the Japan Woman Suffrage Council (Nihon Fujin Sanseiken Kyôkai), formed in 1921. These organizations had different political goals in promoting women’s rights. If they had concentrated on the common ground they shared, rather than on factional differences, the groups could have stood together and developed a unified women’s rights movement, as did happen later with some single-issue campaigns.64 Besides factionalism, which weakened and demoralized them, the sociopolitical pressures on the women’s rights activists and socialists were strong. Mary Ritter Beard, who researched Japanese women in 1922 and 1923, articulated this flaw, noting regretfully that “the most capable of the women, feeling the inadequacy of the part each alone could play in the struggle for social readjustments seemed verging toward discouragements as effort after effort for federation failed.”65 Against this frustrating background, the first of these significant efforts in the period after World War I was the foundation of the New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai) in 1919. It was organized by liberal women, including the editor of the by-then-defunct Seitō journal, Hiratsuka Raichô; the journalist and labor movement advocate Ichikawa Fusae; and a journalist for a working-class women’s magazine, Oku Mumeo (1895–1997).66 Gaining support mainly from middle-class women and from some men, the New Women’s Association developed two political campaigns. One was for the amendment of Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hô), which was revised in 1922 so that Japanese women regained the right to attend political meetings. Another aim was to make an issue of women’s right to control their sexuality. To narrow the focus, the association requested that the government should prevent men who carried sexually transmittable diseases from marrying and should protect wives economically and legally when their husbands infected them.67

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The association also published a journal, Women’s Alliance (Josei Dômei), which, like its predecessors, carried articles by Western feminists and served as a forum for Japanese feminists. Josei Dômei created an ideological base to promote suffrage and women’s rights movement in Japan, by carrying prosuffrage articles and providing information about social activism in post-suffrage America. Examples of the latter were the publication of U.S. suffrage handbills, including “Teachers Need the Vote!” and Charlotte Perkins Gil­ man’s article “Does Woman Need to Receive Alimony?”68 The association was clearly demonstrating that the notion of women’s rights covered both public and domestic spheres. The result of this understanding was that they turned their attention to the suffrage movement, but the association was disbanded in 1922 when its leaders left, including Ichikawa, who traveled to the United States to research the women’s and labor movements there.69 In addition to such “new” women’s organizations, the JWCTU had been part of the vanguard of social reform in Japan since the late nineteenth century. However, unlike its American counterpart, the JWCTU did not promote women’s suffrage until 1921. Even Gauntlett (née Yamada) Tsune (1873–1953), one of the leaders of the union and a promoter of social reform, desired “to do all in my power to improve the social conditions and therefore promote the status of women in my country,” but had thought at first that “I would rather keep out of the [suffrage] movement, picturing to myself the doings of the militant suffragettes.”70 The Japanese media reported sarcastically on acts of vandalism by British suffragettes in the 1910s.71 Perhaps partly influenced too by her English mother-in-law’s objection to the militancy of the movement led by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), Gauntlett’s view seems to have been that the radical image of the British suffrage campaign, with its street protests, direct action, imprisonment, and forced feeding during hunger strikes, impeded efforts to tackle the fundamental political problem underlying social injustice in Japan.72 Given that, in any case, the JWCTU as an organization did not prioritize women’s suffrage at that point, its members sought to negotiate with society to promote the women’s rights movement in a way that they anticipated would be acceptable. However, Gauntlett changed her mind after direct contact with Western activists, through attending the WCTU Congress in London and being invited by the IWSA to participate in the Eighth IWSA Congress in Geneva in 1920 as an observer. There, Gauntlett realized the interconnectedness of peace, equality, the vote, and international womanhood, and she decided to work for suffrage in Japan. For her, meeting with suffragists like the IWSA president, Carrie Chapman Catt of the United States, Corbett Ashby of Britain, Marie Stritt (1855–1928) of Germany, Aletta Jacobs of

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the Netherlands, and many other women from various countries was transformational. She was deeply moved by Catt’s speech on the suffrage cause, which made her determine that “I would not rest until I saw an organized women’s suffrage movement started in my own country.” A speech by Stritt made Gauntlett realize the necessity of women’s international unity and of initiatives to promote world peace.73 Meeting in war-torn Europe was important for Gauntlett’s new ability to conceptualize the links between issues. Upon returning to Japan, she and her colleague Kubushiro Ochimi (1882– 1972) persuaded the members of the JWCTU to promote the suffrage movement, which led the JWCTU to organize a branch of the IWSA—the Japan Woman Suffrage Council (JWSC)—within the JWCTU, in 1921.74 However, even within the JWCTU, which had more than six hundred members throughout Japan, the council was very small.75 The New Woman’s Association, which had more than four hundred women members, did not support the JWSC, partly because there was an aversion among women to the JWCTU’s leadership in the suffrage movement.76 Gauntlett and the JWCTU came under criticism over her decision to affiliate with the IWSA without a national consensus.77 Women’s suffrage itself was not an issue that could unify all women, even within the middle class. Lacking a broader consensus among feminists in Japan, the JWSC did not become important to the suffrage movement in Japan until 1924, a year after the Great Kanto Earthquake. Separate from these reform-oriented groups, the Red Wave Society (Sekirankai) was founded in 1921 with the express purpose of eradicating class and gender oppression. Several younger socialist women led the society, including Sakai (Kondô) Magara (1903–1983), who was the daughter of leading socialist Sakai Toshihiko and his wife, Tameko. The socialist feminist Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980) and an anarchist, Itô Noe (1895–1923), served as advisors.78 To foster political and feminist consciousness and raise funds, the Red Wave Society held lecture meetings on women’s problems and distributed and sold propaganda pamphlets.79 One of the conditions that enabled the formation of the group was that for a time in the 1910s the government’s suppression of socialist groups had loosened, and the labor movement also gained impetus from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The sociopolitical culture of the Taishô period (1912– 1926) was somewhat less restrictive than that of the Meiji period, and notions of civil rights and freedom were gaining social acceptance. This liberalization gave laborers the confidence to hold the first May Day demonstration in 1920. Emboldened, members of the Red Wave Society participated in the second May Day demonstration in 1921, becoming the first women’s organization to join in a Japanese May Day demonstration. However, all the

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members who marched were arrested and some were imprisoned overnight. This indicated that the government’s control had begun to tighten again, and it was especially focused on socialists. Starting with the May Day demonstration, members of the Red Wave Society were often arrested, fined, and imprisoned. Combined with internal conflict between Bolshevists and anarchists, these repeated arrests and suppression caused the Red Wave Society to dwindle to almost nothing by 1922.80 The ephemeral nature of these three organizations—the New Women’s Association, the Japan Woman Suffrage Council, and the Red Wave Society—indicated the difficulty that patriarchal control and lack of unity caused for those promoting a strong women’s rights movement in the early 1920s. The politics of the period were complex and contradictory. On the one hand, there was an international, and to some extent democratizing, political climate, perhaps created by the fact that Japan was allied with relatively democratic countries in World War I.81 Japan was one of the founding nations of the International Labor Organization in 1919 as well as the League of Nations. By 1919 there was a political party, the Constitutional party (Kenseikai), supporting universal manhood suffrage.82 For birth control advocate and suffragist Ishimoto (Katô) Shidzue (1897–2001), the liberal social climate of the so-called Taishô democracy era was one in which “the idea of democracy, accompanied by the pacifist ideal of internationalism, finally dominated a people disillusioned with respect to nationalist and conservative leadership everywhere by the results of the World War.”83 On the other hand, there was conflict and repression. In July 1918, fishermen’s wives in Toyama prefecture protested against a rise in the price of rice, leading to the so-called rice riots (kome sôdô), and the riots spread throughout Japan. This coincided with an increasing number of labor disputes. Soaring inflation and economic instability threatened the laboring class, which, in the summer of 1921, led to labor disputes that were Japan’s largest in the period before 1945. As the government policed the May Day demonstration in 1921, it suppressed the labor movement using the police and the military, targeting strike leaders.84 Kawakami Isamu, the general secretary of the Japan Peace Society and of the Correspondence and Publicity Bureau of the Japan Peace Society and the American Peace Society of Japan, wrote to WILPF in 1921 on the probable effects of this: I understand their first work [members of the Woman’s Peace Society of Japan, which was organized in May 1921] will be to cooperate with women in Europe for the rescue of women and children [in]

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invaded countries. At this present they will emphasize this point in their work rather than women’s rights and freedom and universal suffrage. I think considering the present conditions, this is a very wise action, for there are many newly established women’s organizations quite separate from this [WPSJ] which are emphasizing this work, but these organizations all have more or less of a tendency to socialism and radicalism and are not international. Under present circumstances in Japan these organizations will not live long.85 The development of the Red Wave Society was indeed repeatedly frustrated by the imprisonment of its members. The New Women’s Association, which initially envisaged a suffrage campaign as next on its political agenda, abandoned the attempt to initiate a mass movement. As Kawakami implied, in Japan the peace movement was clearly more acceptable and practicable than that of the suffrage and women’s rights movement, because of its focus on nonpolitical and charitable activities. Furthermore, women’s organizations generally suffered an additional flaw in their inability to promote cooperation between middle- and working-class women. Historians have since seen the revision of Article 5 in 1922, which after some unsuccessful earlier work by women of the Heiminsha was cemented by the New Women’s Association, as laying the groundwork for the suffrage movement.86 However, at the time, Yamakawa Kikue was critical of the association, noting that revision of Article 5 “has not [an] important bearing upon the proletarian women because, whether they have any legal right[s] or not, they can never imagine to enjoy freedom of speech or association, just as their men-folk.”87 Yamanouchi Mina (1900–1990), a factory worker and labor movement activist, agreed with Yamakawa’s criticism: “Working-class women, who were at the bottom of the ladder under capitalism, never reached the social position to be involved in parliamentary politics.”88 A women’s rights movement among middle-class women that paid attention to the plight of working-class women as well was badly needed. As Yamakawa noted, a characteristic flaw in the women’s movement in early 1920s Japan was the inability to both attain feminist consciousness and cross the class divide. The era’s official ideal of womanhood—good wife and wise mother—was supposed to be universal, and leaders in the movement certainly understood that all women’s interests were different from those of men; yet women did not as yet build a strong bridge across class differences, because, as Tsuda Umeko articulated, middle-class women were largely isolated from working-class women.89

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From Social Reform Work to the Unified Suffrage Movement The trigger for a successful alliance of different women’s organizations was the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923. The aftershocks and fires following the earthquake devastated Tokyo and left huge numbers of its residents homeless and destitute. To deal with this, the Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU) directors, including Kubushiro Ochimi, called for more than forty women’s groups to join in the relief work. As an immediate response, thirteen organizations joined together to initiate emergency social assistance, and these members founded the Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations (TFWO; Tokyo Rengô Fujinkai). Those gathered were mainly women from Christian or Christian-related organizations, including the YWCAJ, the Women’s Peace Association in Japan (WPAJ; Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai), the alumnae of Japan Woman’s University (Ofu-Kai), Tokyo Woman’s Christian University (Tokyo Joshi Daigaku), the Freedom School (Jiyû Gakuen), and women’s church groups. In addition, women from non-Christian organizations, including the Woman Suffrage Alliance (Fujin Sansei Dômei, formed in 1923 by some members of the New Women’s Association); Jissen Girls’ School (Jissen Jogakkô); the alumnae of Tokyo Woman’s Normal School (Tokyo Joshi Shihan Gakkô); the Patriotic Women’s Association; and women’s occupational organizations, including nurses and housemaids, joined this groundbreaking federation.90 In all, more than one hundred women from different affiliations joined the Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations, in addition to individuals, including socialist women such as Yamakawa Kikue and Sakai Magara.91 Women’s activism had in fact been ongoing since the late nineteenth century, but euphoria from this event encouraged Mary Ritter Beard to claim, after the earthquake, that “in a single night the women’s movement was born.”92 To fulfill the different needs of earthquake survivors’ households, the TFWO women negotiated with the Tokyo municipal government and took responsibility for delivering milk to families with small children. Following this beginning, the federation established more extensive overarching plans to improve women’s lives in Tokyo that could simultaneously support the rebuilding of Tokyo in the longer term. To achieve this aim, the TFWO created several working divisions. The Political Department dealt with issues of licensed prostitution, suffrage, and peace; the Industrial Department aimed to increase women’s economic opportunities; the Educational Department discussed ways to improve school education; the Labor Department had an explicit goal to improve conditions for working women and girls; and the

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Social Service Department discussed the welfare of households, in particular that of mothers and children.93 By creating these specific departments, the federation ensured that each organization and each individual could make use of their strengths, and that the full range of women’s issues and needs would be covered, while avoiding duplication of work. This series of women’s initiatives, both for the immediate crisis and toward broader reform through negotiation with the government, meant that the TFWO women had developed a unified women’s movement with concrete objectives and a systematic methodology. They started with grassroots reform work, but they envisaged a strong women’s rights movement across the nation. This developed feminist consciousness could be seen in the organization in 1923 of the National League for the Abolition of Licensed Prostitution (Zenkoku Kôshô Haishi Kisei Dômei) by women in the Political Department of the TFWO, including Kubushiro Ochimi, Sakai Magara, and Yamakawa Kikue.94 In addition to opposing the reconstruction of the prostitution districts in Tokyo that had been destroyed by the earthquake, these women campaigned nationwide against licensed prostitution. The antiprostitution movement also incorporated a broader reform plan to raise women’s economic and social status. The women indicted licensed prostitution as ­government-sponsored “slavery” through which women were exploited and had their human rights violated by the nation. The rhetoric of the antiprostitution movement differentiated licensed prostitutes from street prostitutes, because although the root cause of prostitution was poverty, a “license” meant the government’s direct involvement in “sex-slavery,”95 whereas the word street represented government neglect of woman’s welfare. Both licensed and street prostitution were manifestations of women’s exploitation by society. While the first demand of the antiprostitution movement was for the legal abolition of the licensed prostitution system, they also insisted that raising women’s status in society would abolish the need for their becoming prostitutes.96 Serious shortcomings in government policies for women were clear in the neglect of women’s educational improvement, job-training opportunities, unemployment support measures, the working environment, and accommodation for mothers with children. The fundamental issue in prostitution was the government’s double attack of licensing and repression that enabled the physical and economic control of women.97 This recognition led these antiprostitution activists to write that “we shall not mistake the abolition of licensed prostitution for that of the more complex and broader issue of street prostitution. We will not be satisfied with just the abolition of the licensed prostitution, but we will also

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seize opportunities to raise women’s status in society, firm in the recognition that there is no other way to prevent women becoming prostitutes.”98 The activists were accurately articulating the structure of institutional gender oppression. It can be seen that the JWCTU women initiated relief activism in the wake of the earthquake from the forming of the TFWO and the fact that its residential home for women, which had escaped the fire, was the headquarters for the TFWO. Contact with Americans and Christians, especially Americans, as the JWCTU women demonstrated, was a direct channel for getting information, theory, models, and methods for social activism. Such models had not been strong enough to unite all women before the earthquake. In Mary Ritter Beard’s view, the destruction of modern Tokyo temporarily mitigated patriarchy, and while as she put it, “the men were still dazed by the tragic events,” Japanese women voluntarily “opened their doors to all the refugees.” Humanitarian consciousness overrode divisions among women, which Beard identified as “a matter of theory or academic discussion or popular leadership.”99 In extremis these women recognized and exercised publicly their responsibilities in society, which had formerly been confined to the sphere of the family. Humanitarian concerns based on their common gender and sense of responsibility in society united women, regardless of factional differences. In this context, Mary Ritter Beard also demonstrated the new strength of the women’s cause. Mary Beard first visited Tokyo in 1922, accompanying her husband, Charles, who was then serving as an advisor to the Bureau of Municipal Research in Tokyo at the request of then-mayor of Tokyo Gotô Shimpei (1857–1929). After the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, Mary Beard accompanied Charles Beard to Japan, when he was again asked by Gotô to provide advice, in this case to reconstruct Tokyo.100 Through her visits, Beard increased her acquaintance with Japanese women and society and developed many friendships, including one with Ishimoto Shidzue, whose birth control activism is examined in some depth in Chapter 4. While Charles Beard was advising on the rebuilding the infrastructure of Tokyo, Mary Beard arranged to engage in social reform work.101 In addition to providing material support, including temporary shelter for earthquake refugees, she shared information on practical approaches to social activism that had proven effective in American social services.102 The TFWO women made good use of Mary Beard’s advice, and this highly competent activism led her to note that “Japanese women’s ability to use the most civilized western methods proves they are no more inferior to women in the West.”103 Mary Beard implies that the Japanese were ready to take on responsibilities in the

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public sphere in a modern Japan, as well as to claim equality with Western feminists, who she acknowledges may previously have seen them as inferior. Mary Beard declared to Japanese women, “You are following the same path that American women took and it is your turn to play role models for women in the rest of the world.”104 This would indicate that Beard believed that women under modern patriarchy everywhere had a similar experience of oppression. She emphasized that it was through grassroots social activism (such as the health care and welfare issues the TFWO women were promoting) that American women had proved they were integral parts of society, helping them to gain suffrage. Beard encouraged Japanese women to take advantage of other women’s examples where they had proved effective, in order to advance their own status in Japan in line with their own needs and conditions. It was precisely this unity based on shared learning that the TFWO intended to signify when it posted its motto in English: “We are united to give proper attention to all matters concerning the civic and legal status of women.”105 Beard recommended that “as relief gives way to rehabilitation, the same courage must be carried into the wider organization of their own sex for social study and achievement.”106 Beard left this work for Japanese women to do themselves, and beginning with their relief work, the middle-class women did indeed succeed in uniting with each other beyond narrow factional boundaries. More importantly, via contact with women from other social stations through various joint community activities, they also crossed class lines, which in turn allowed them to develop an insight into women’s universally oppressed status across society. In December 1924, in response to the request by Gauntlett and Kubushiro of the Japan Woman Suffrage Council, around sixty women held the Inaugural General Congress for the Women’s Suffrage League (Fujin Sanseiken Kakutoku Kiseidômeikai Sôritsusôkai), which led to the creation of a larger suffrage group, the Women’s Suffrage League (WSL; Fujin Sanseiken Kakutoku Kisei Dômeikai, renamed Fusen Kakutoku Dômei in 1925).107 The members of the WSL strongly desired that the league should work gradually toward a large-scale woman’s rights movement. To meet the demand for suffrage, the WSL promoted fusen, or universal woman suffrage to national as well as local governments and demanded the right for women to be able to join political parties, which had not been included in the revision of Article 5 two years before.108 In its infancy, the WSL primarily lobbied the government for woman suffrage and provided members with lectures on politics.109 Such in-house training was important to disseminate knowledge about woman suffrage to the WSL members in order to strengthen the

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suffrage movement. This was especially important because for some members, like Takeuchi Shigeyo, even thinking of the idea of woman suffrage was too radical. Takeuchi later became a leading activist for the WSL, yet at first she was “so scared that I could not stop shaking when the term ‘kakutoku’ (to gain) came to my mind.”110 As a result, the WSL leaders waited for political consciousness to slowly but steadily percolate through the membership, in the meantime focusing on national activities. However, it would be wrong to say that members of the WSL were isolated from the international women’s rights movement before the Great Kanto Earthquake. Some leading members of the WSL had been able to make contact with Western feminists through their membership of other women’s organizations with international channels of communication, based on specific objectives, including suffrage, birth control, and peace, as well as the JWCTU and the YWCAJ. Also, Ichikawa Fusae (cofounder of the New Women’s Association) traveled to the United States between 1921 and 1924, and again in 1928 (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2). During these visits, she built friendships with American feminists and their organizations, including the LWV and the NWP, which enabled her to tell Japanese women about how American suffrage was achieved and about the activities of the women’s rights movement in the United States after enfranchisement.111 Ichikawa learned much and absorbed strategies for reform at the Chicago Women’s Club, which was to prove particularly useful during the 1930s.112 The most significant support and encouragement Ichikawa received was from her meetings with the American suffragette Alice Paul (1885–1977), cofounder of the NWP, who advised her to concentrate exclusively on the suffrage movement in Japan.113 The friendship between Paul and Ichikawa also helped to facilitate links between the NWP and the WSL (See Figure 2.3). Evidence of this affectionate friendship could be seen in activities like the members of the WSL performing a short play in 1925 about the suffrage campaign waged by Alice Paul and the NWP, put on as part of attempts to publicize the suffrage movement in Japan. In the same year the WSL designed its flag and used the same three colors as the NWP—purple, white, and yellow.114 At the same time, the NWP’s journal, Equal Rights, carried news and issues from around the world, serving as a useful tool for exchanging information about the women’s movement in Japan and elsewhere. After a period of reorganization and member education on suffrage issues, in 1927 the WSL asked to become an affiliate member of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (renamed from the IWSA in 1926, IAWSEC, usually shortened to IAW) and it gained approval in 1928. “If we affiliate with the Alliance, we can send our delegate to the

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Figure 2.1. Attendees at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in 1923. Bottom section (right half of original photo): most likely Alice Paul sitting fifth and Ichikawa Fusae sitting sixth from right. (Source: Courtesy of the Fusae Ichikawa Center for Women and Governance.)

Alliance Congress to vote,” Ichikawa noted. “We directly and indirectly gain encouragement from the Alliance via its journal and other published materials. We can gain guidance and support [from the Alliance], to which we can also provide something. . . . We call for women’s international unity.”115 She was making it clear that Japanese women were ready both to coordinate their efforts with other women for their mutual benefit and to play their part in an international women’s community. Ichikawa was correct in her belief that affiliation would bring benefits in both directions. For example, the IAWSEC president, Corbett Ashby, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi (1870–1931) in 1929

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Figure 2.2. Three non-American attendees at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, 1923. Ichikawa Fusae is on the right. (Source: Courtesy of the Fusae Ichikawa Center for Women and Governance.)

and urged him to enfranchise women.116 In return, in 1930, at the request of the IAWSEC and the International Council of Women, the WSL in Japan lobbied the Japanese government to support Western women’s proposals to create the Women’s Consultative Committee on Nationality in the League of Nations. These included the issue of the nationality of women married to citizens of another country. Western women requested support for the principle that marriage should not affect a woman’s nationality. In other words, a woman should have the same rights as a man to retain or to change her nationality through international marriage.117 The WSL in its journal Fusen in 1931 praised Alice Paul and Doris Stevens of the Inter-American Commission of Women for their initiative to have the League of Nations incorporate the nationality issue into the league’s agenda as a woman’s right.118 Paul and Stevens had researched the laws and customs relating to nationality in nations all over the world, including Japan, using the collected data at the meeting of the League of Nations Women’s Consultative Committee on Nationality.119 The nationality and international marriage issue was seen by the WSL as unimportant for Japanese women, as few entered into

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Figure 2.3. Elizabeth Green, presenting the National Woman’s Party’s flag to the Women’s Suffrage League, Tokyo 1929. Mrs. Green is third from the right; to her right are her daughter Elizabeth, Kubushiro Ochimi, and Ichikawa Fusae. In the back row, from right to left, are Ishimoto Shidzue, Kawasaki Natsu, Fujita Taki, Tsukiyama Raku (not mentioned in the text), and Kaneko Shigeri. (Source: Courtesy of the Fusae Ichikawa Center for Women and Governance.)

international marriages. Gauntlett Tsune was the first Japanese woman to be officially registered as the wife of a non-Japanese citizen living in Japan. According to her, there was no precedent in the Japanese legal system for accepting and registering an international marriage. To have the marriage officially recognized, Gauntlett abandoned her Japanese nationality and obtained British nationality.120 In spite of its reservations the WSL approved the issue, because they saw that it embodied the core value of gender equality and that their support on the nationality issue could “encourage” the entire Western women’s movement.121 However, in spite of its increasing support for the methods and ideologies of the Western women’s movements, the WSL was quite selective in its choice of which initiatives by American feminists to support. For example, in spite of close contact with the NWP, the WSL women did not support every

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aspect of the NWP’s agenda. Japanese suffragists such as Ichikawa Fusae, for example, did not support the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the United States. The NWP, which sought absolute equality between the sexes, was a strong advocate for the ERA, which equated protective legislation with economic restrictions on women. However, many reformers were against the ERA because they thought it threatened protective legislation.122 Consequently bitter and widespread conflict developed among women’s groups. Alice Paul—who had, after all, drafted it—asked Ichikawa to support the ERA, but she declined to do so. Ichikawa thought that while protective laws treated men and women differently and therefore in a way opposed the principle of equality between the sexes, nevertheless such laws were necessary, for example to protect younger factory women in Japan.123 Japanese suffragists had this objection in common with the members of the League of Women Voters in America. The League of Women Voters, the offspring of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, devoted itself to educating women voters to become responsible citizens in a democracy, advocated liberal reform, and fought for protective legislation for expectant mothers and infants.124 Such reform-oriented women opposed the ERA. In the historian Susan Ware’s analysis, most women in public life believed that protective labor legislation for working women, such as minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, was more important than a general statement of equality under the law.125 Ichikawa’s desire to enact laws for women in Japan could also be seen in her organizing the League for Protection of Motherhood in 1934.126

The First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu in 1928 It is worthwhile examining how Japanese middle-class feminists entered into a direct dialogue with internationally minded women from other nations in the Pacific region by looking at their participation in the First PanPacific Women’s Conference (PPWC) in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1928. The conference, which was initiated by American feminists in Hawaii, was the first international women’s forum in the Pacific region, with more than two hundred participants including delegates from Australia, Canada, China, Fuji, India, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United States, and Hawaii. To ensure that intercultural communication was effective as a central tool for promoting equality and peace, Jane Addams was chosen as president; as the first president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and leader of Hull House, the Chicago

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social settlement house, she had suitable experience. The conference agenda covered five themes important to the women’s rights movement of the era: Health, Education, Women in Industry, Women in Government, and Social Service. National delegates were requested to present papers dealing with specific issues that were important in their country, covering these five topics.127 The idea of holding “a women’s and mothers’ conference” was originally proposed by Mark Cohen (1849–1928), a member of the New Zealand legislature who was inspired by welfare activity by feminists in Hawaii, including Mrs. Francis M. Swanzy, while attending the male-organized Pan-Pacific Food Conservation Conference held under the auspices of the Pan-Pacific Union (PPU).128 Alexander Hume Ford (1868–1945), the director of the PPU, immediately adopted this idea and set up the machinery for a women’s conference, as one of a wider series with topics that included, science, the commercial press, research, conservation, food, and ethics.129 Ford was what one of what historian Yasutake Rumi called “Hawai’i’s Haole (white) elite men” and was instrumental in forming the idea of “PanPacific internationalism,” which can be defined as the establishment of peace and stability in the Pacific and the world under the leadership of AngloAmerican social reformers, many the descendants of protestant missionaries. This was formalized in two male-led organizations in Hawaii: the PPU in 1917 and the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) in 1925. Although women were underrepresented, the fact that women participated in conferences held by these organizations in Hawaii eventually paved the way for holding the PPWC.130 Importantly, such Anglo-American reformers’ ideals were supported by male leaders in other countries who pursued Western liberalism along with their economic and diplomatic interests.131 For example, some created local Pan-Pacific Clubs within their own nations, including in Tokyo and Osaka in Japan, which affiliated with the PPU.132 Similarly, they organized national councils for the IPR to research and report local problems.133 While the PPU promoted “the closest peace and harmony and cooperation effort [among] all people and races of the Pacific,”134 the IPR aimed to study “the conditions of the Pacific peoples with the view to the improvement of mutual relations.”135 Thus, it would be possible to argue that Pan-Pacific internationalism, or what Ford termed “the Pan-Pacific Movement,”136 created the discourse that Hawaii was the crossroads of the Pacific, where people of the Pacific shared prosperity and peace by accepting the leadership of the United States. It was in this context that the PPWC was organized. In planning the gathering, the organizers did not simply follow Ford’s advice to have a “Motherhood and Child Welfare Conference” to the letter.

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They modified and expanded the original idea in such a way that the conference was to cover the five themes mentioned earlier that were important to the women’s rights movement in the West in the post-suffrage era. Rather than seeing it simply as a conference on women’s issues in general, the organizers regarded the conference as a way of globalizing the women’s rights movement. This was increasingly seen as necessary in order to address ­women’s responsibility to promote peace and social justice in the world, which could not be done in isolation. Jane Addams, in her presidential address, said that the purpose was that “we not only meet to talk together, but to discover topics of mutual concern which we could discover in no other way.”137 More recently the historian Sugimori Nagako has characterized the PPWC as an example of “pashifizumu to feminizumu no yûgô” (merging pacifism and feminism).138 The historian Fiona Paisley has pointed out that attempts to contain Japan’s military aggression were a factor in the Pacific area being chosen as the region for the conference—and indeed the Pacific later became one of the theaters of World War II.139 Japanese women formed one of the biggest delegations to the conference, with eighteen official delegates, four associate delegates, and three observers. Numerous Japanese middle-class women’s organizations in the Tokyo area supported the PPWC in this way, including the TFWO, JWCTU, WPAJ, YWCAJ, WSL, alumnae of the Japan Woman’s University (Ofu-Kai), alumnae of the Higher Normal School, alumnae of the Women’s English School (Joshi Eigaku Juku), and the Japan Women’s Medical Association (Nihon Joikai). The Pan-Pacific Association of Osaka (Osaka Han Taiheiyô Kyôkai) and the Federation of Primary School Women’s Teachers’ Association (Zen­ koku Shôgakkô Jokyôiinkai) also sent delegates. In addition, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper company elected one delegate by popular vote. Some attendees had been sponsored to join international conferences by the WCTU, the IWSA, and the WILPF in the past and were therefore well grounded in international activity. They were, by this period, well aware of the internationalizing current in the feminist movement, and of the necessity to represent Japan through their presence in international women’s conferences.140 Leading members of the Japanese delegation included Inoue Hideko, a professor at the Japan Women’s University (chair), Gauntlett Tsune (vice chair), and Ichikawa Fusae.141 (See Figure 2.4.) However, not all Japanese women supported the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference. For example, a proletarian women’s organization, the National Women’s League (Zenkoku Fujin Dômei) opposed the PPWC. In their view, it was a bourgeois-centered conference that was symptomatic of the

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Figure 2.4. Three members of the Women’s Suffrage League before Ichikawa Fusae’s departure to represent the league at the First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu in 1928. Left to right: Takeuchi Shigeyo, Ichikawa Fusae, and Kaneko Shigeri. (Source: Courtesy of the Fusae Ichikawa Center for Women and Governance.)

cooperative interplay between the feminist movement and imperialism, and therefore it held no appeal to Japanese working-class women.142 In spite of domestic disagreement on the usefulness or otherwise of the PPWC to the advancement of Japanese women, the Japanese delegates had positive expectations for the conference. For example, for Ichikawa, the primary significance of the PPWC was “to take advantage of it and to advance the women’s rights movement in Japan.”143 Others had specific issue-based goals in mind. For Inoue, the PPWC was a forum to express Japanese ­women’s efforts to alleviate domestic as well as international problems of food and population.144 Also, Gauntlett raised the issue of prostitution and the struggles of antiprostitution activists in Japan, in a period when Western feminists agreed that the “question of morality” was commonly on the agenda of international women’s conferences and that women had a special responsibility to challenge double standards and sexual hypocrisy.145 Yasutake points out that the members of the Tokyo WCTU had worked for the abolition of licensed prostitution and for the curtailment of

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prostitution in overseas colonies in order to uphold Japan’s national reputation.146 Gauntlett requested the conference organizers to include “the question of Traffic in Women” as a theme for discussion in the Social Service section147 and then presented her paper, titled “[The] Anti-Vice Movement in Japan: An Examination of the Position of Japan in Relation to the League of Nations Treaty,” usefully linking the particular domestic women’s rights issue of prostitution in Japan with the wider international one of trafficking.148 This was important because some years earlier in 1919, international women’s organizations, including the ICW and the IWSA, had lobbied the League of Nations to add the trafficking issue to its convention. As a result, the suppression of the traffic in women and children was stipulated in Article 23(c) of the Covenant of the League of Nations.149 The league initially founded an Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children in 1921, conducted a survey on trafficking in women, and published the final report in 1927.150 And yet the league’s Western focus left women in similar conditions in Asia invisible, having originally used the phrase “White Slave Traffic.”151 The Japanese government confirmed the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children (1921) in 1925, while reserving its right to maintain the age limit at eighteen, only raising the age limit to twenty-one in 1927. The presentation of Gauntlett’s paper resulted in a roundtable discussion on the topic of “Traffic in Women and Children—An International Problem” and two resolutions. To achieve this, first delegates from Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United States, and Japan reported on prostitution and government policies in their respective local contexts. After roundtable discussions, the PPWC unanimously passed resolutions to ask the Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children at the League of Nations “to investigate thoroughly conditions in those countries within this area [the Pacific basin] which have not already been examined” and to exhort women in the Pacific area “to do all in their power to influence their governments to carry out the recommendations of the League of Nations Report on the Traffic in Women and Children, including those urging the employment of women police and the abolitions of state regulation and of licensed [brothel] houses.”152 To give effect to these resolutions, Eleanor M. Hinder (1893–1963), an Australian delegate and conference program secretary to the PPWC, sent a telegram to Rachel E. Crowdy (1884–1964), chief of the Department of Opium Traffic and Social Issues Section of the League of Nations. Hinder encouraged Crowdy to include human trafficking issues in the Pacific area in her section report to the League Assembly, writing, “The Pan-Pacific

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Women’s Conference is of the opinion that it would be of great value to the countries of the Pacific Basin if the Body of Reports on the Traffic in Women and Children of the League of Nations, would continue to investigate, thoroughly, conditions of those countries within this area which have not already been examined.” Hinder continued, “It is the opinion of more than one person that by this action, the very great work of this section for the women of the world has become nearer to women of the Pacific in a way that is has never been possible for it to do before.”153 Thus, the PPWC and its national delegates, including Japanese women, politicized national women’s issues and expanded them to include Pacific women—and by extension, the world. In doing so, they were able to address communally the problems of women within each nation and internationally. The League of Nations was seen as a useful forum in achieving this. For Japanese participants, the PPWC was a revealing opportunity. It helped them both practically, in developing the scope of the feminist movement in Japan, and ideologically, in justifying their belief in women’s activism. Although Japanese women could not be elected to government posts because they were still unenfranchised, nevertheless, they could explain conditions in Japan at the conference and take their place in the international community of women. Having once experienced such politically active roles, Japanese women would no longer confine themselves to the roles prescribed by the official notion of “good wife and wise mother.” Also, they had understood that it was possible to influence government policies and reform society through international pressure. In Ichikawa’s view, although discussions in the Government section of the conference were less stimulating than she had expected, she acknowledged that Japanese delegates’ presentations on Japanese social issues, including women’s political status and the licensed prostitution system, were effective enough in that that they seemed to have embarrassed the government.154 An example of this was Gauntlett’s criticism on this international stage of the government double standard regarding the licensed prostitution system. The effectiveness of her strategy was proven by the fact that the Japanese government, at least eventually, accepted the League of Nations investigation on the Trafficking in Women and Children in 1931—even though the government did not actually change its policies.155 Japanese women were thus able to seek a solution for national problems through international cooperation. Consequently, “to facilitate communication with the Joint Standing Committee of the Women’s International Organizations,” members of the WSL hastened to form the Japan Women’s Committee for International Relations (JWCIR; Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai) in 1929.156

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More importantly, recognizing the need for international communication, the WSL engaged in the international feminist network—but selectively. For example, responding to the ICW’s request to send a delegate to the Vienna Congress, Ichikawa wrote, “We have asked Mrs. Tsuji [Tsuji Matsu of the JWCIR and YWCAJ] to represent the Committee at the Vienna Congress.” But in the same letter, Ichikawa pointedly refused the ICW’s request to form a national council of the ICW, by noting that “the time is not ripe yet for the formation of the National Council in Japan.”157 Ichikawa wanted to take advantage of the theory and practice of the international feminist movement but used critical judgment about how and when to apply them to the specifics of the Japanese context. Through multiple channels of contact with various groups in the West, Japanese women created a ­communication network, particularly with American feminists, for exploring the direction and strategies of the women’s rights movement. This contact allowed Japanese feminists to shape their activities in a fashion that took advantage of the most politically and socially feasible maneuvers in the national and international circumstances of the period between the 1920s and 1930s. Two months after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the JWCTU activist Moriya Azuma (1884–1975) spoke for many middle-class women activists of the era when she expressed her decision to take an active role as a woman to rebuild Tokyo. She wrote, “Boulevard trees in the Capital stood just like fake and dead trees. Baron Sakatani, mayor [of Tokyo] had planted them. However, in three weeks [after the earthquake], new buds—flash of hope—came out of those trees. . . . To rebuild the Empire’s Capital, women, half of the population, should rise as capable persons.”158 Before the earthquake, the creative roles in modern society belonged to men like the mayor of Tokyo. However, after it, Moriya saw the new buds as symbols of a state of raised consciousness among women, who were willing to participate in modern society building. This action in turn built self-confidence within women. Equally important, feminist activism based on friendship between different cultures was mutually beneficial, as both Beard and Japanese women acknowledged. Moriya expressed her heartfelt appreciation by noting that “Mrs. Beard took part in our meeting and worked in the same way as a Japanese woman.”159 Equally, Beard felt that “especially moving is the quick emergence of the women to more social leadership—a leadership full of import not only for the Japanese nation itself but for our nation as well.”160 Sharing efforts with Japanese women to rebuild Tokyo and change conditions

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there from “savage” to “civilized and modern” led Beard to reconfirm women’s universal roles in promoting peace and welfare in society, regardless of specific national differences. Such women’s roles, which Beard described as winning “struggles against the opposing human elements,” which she saw as including “disease, slavery, feeblemindedness and oppression of all kinds,” linked women internationally.161 Vitally, as the JWCTU women demonstrated, Christianity was an important vehicle for launching a women’s rights movement in Japan, which in time led to the formation of a larger suffrage alliance, the WSL. Not only was the discourse of the women’s rights movement conveyed by Christian social activism, but also Japanese members of international Christian organizations had plenty of opportunities to gain knowledge about the women’s rights movement through direct contact with their Western counterparts. In part, Christianity facilitated communication between Western and Japanese feminists. At the same time, as we have seen, while supporting Western women’s causes, Japanese feminists adapted such knowledge to suit Japanese circumstances. Finally, as the example of the IWSA indicates, the suffrage movement created a mutually supportive space within which Japanese women could interact with their Western counterparts. From this interaction women were able to shape and focus Japanese participation within the era’s international women’s movement. Two years after the inception of the WSL, in 1926 the American writer Frances Parkinson Keyes asked Ishimoto Shidzue if she felt that Japanese women “were entirely ready” for the vote. Ishimoto replied: I believe that we are prepared for it now. . . . Now we are learning that a woman cannot be completely a good wife and a good mother unless she is also a good citizen. I do not think we should aspire to hold office at first. But [the] franchise we certainly should have. The women have done great things with it already in America.162 The participation of Japanese women in the discourse of the international women’s movement rose to a peak with their participation in the First PPWC in 1928. However, it is clear from Ishimoto’s statements that well before this, some women were fully conscious of the need for participation in international and national political action, in order to pursue women’s shared goals at the time: equality and peace.

3

Generating a Feminist Movement through Peace Activism, 1915–1941 After long mental sufferings, disappointments and re-thinking, I have come to a conclusion, that all we have to try [to do] through these days of war, is to have an infinite faith in the future. So I am trying to keep up my courage in an attempt on building a new future program of our women, through studying the history of women of [the] world. Letter from Ishimoto Shidzue to Dorothy Hamilton Brush (Dick), January 25, 1941

I am very anxious to assist the Peace, and above all, the Feminist Movement; for in my opinion Feminism is the sole hope of the world. Letter from Thomas Baty to Emily Balch,1 March 20, 1948

W

hereas suffrage was primarily a women’s rights issue fought for within single countries, activism for world peace emerged as an urgent and critical international women’s rights issue between the world wars. This chapter deals with the development of, and tensions between, international and national forms of feminist consciousness among middle-class Japanese women social activists, who made concerted efforts toward establishing women’s rights. As mentioned in the Introduction, “national feminist consciousness” is used here in the sense of what Raymond Williams called a “national feeling” compatible with internationalism. National feeling was a sense of pride and identification with cherished tradition, as opposed to nationalism with its exclusive, xenophobic connotations. At the same time, interaction between Western and Japanese women peace activists in the period

Parts of this chapter were previously published in Taeko Shibahara, “How Did Japanese Women Peace Activists Interact with European Women as They Negotiated between Nationalism and Transnational Peace Activism to Promote Peace, 1915–1935?” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 15, no. 1 (March 2011).

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between the two world wars helped middle-class Japanese women develop an internationalist feminist consciousness. Their internationalism was in the sense of the advocacy of mutual cooperation and understanding between nations and is of course not to be confused with the aims of international socialism. They identified themselves not only as women of Japan but also as women of the world. Yet this internationalist feminism was limited and overshadowed by the dominant power of militaristic and aggressively nationalist culture in the period between the world wars in Japan. It was this complex context that shaped Japanese feminism between 1915 and 1941. The promotion of world peace was the core concern and focus for activities in the international women’s rights movement in the period between the world wars, initiated by unenfranchised Western feminists. As they faced the crisis of civilization caused by World War I, feminist reformers collectively saw masculine consciousness as the common root of obstructions to peace and equality. Mary Ritter Beard pointed to what she saw as the “typical bigotry and selfishness of the men” as an explanation for continued warfare as well as the denial of women’s political rights.2 This critical recognition of the linkage between warfare and gender inequity led feminists from European nations and North America to meet in The Hague in 1915 to form the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), which was renamed Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1919. Its founding resolution stipulated that it was essential “both nationally and internationally to put into practice the principle that women should share all civil and political rights and responsibilities on the same terms as men.”3 These linked notions of peace and equality motivated the creation of a peace movement exclusively for women. It was thought that while men, as citizens of nations, worked within the framework of national interests, women, excluded from the decision-making process in national politics and thereby excluded from full citizenship, identified themselves as citizens of the world. In defiance of mainstream nationalism and the belligerent political climate, these women sought the creation of an international women’s friendship network by using the linked concepts of peace and equality.4 Clearly the ideals of WILPF were in opposition to the era’s mainstream civilization discourse, which embraced the progress of society and nationhood through science. WILPF women embraced a “humanitarian civilization” that prioritized people’s welfare, critiquing the warfare and “reckless sacrifice of human life” that the mainstream discourse had created. In particular, the league urged the governments of all nations to adopt the principles of democracy, including peaceful solutions for international disputes;

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universal equality in gender, race, class, and nationality; and respect for cultural difference.5 It was within this discourse of the peace movement created by Western women that in 1921 the Women’s Peace Association in Japan (WPAJ; Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai) was organized.6 Japanese and American Christian women, or those with a Christian background, including professors at Japan Women’s University Inoue Hideko (1875–1963) and Jôdai Tano (1886–1982), Kawai Michi (1877–1953) (educator and YWCAJ member), and Gauntlett Tsune of the JWCTU, led this group. It was the first time since WILPF had first made contact with Tsuda Umeko and several other women and men to request it in 1915 that Japanese middle-class women officially inaugurated a peace movement.7 Although on the surface these women organized the WPAJ to meet the WILPF request, the association did not actually affiliate with WILPF, which indicated that the WPAJ planned to organize their own independent peace movement. In 1924, Inoue Hideko, the chairperson of the WPAJ, three years after its inception, wrote a letter to Emily Greene Balch, the general secretary of WILPF, reporting on WPAJ members’ increasing willingness to support the peace cause. She wrote, “We do not hesitate so much to participate in [the] international movement with women of the world.” But Inoue added that the directors of the WPAJ “do not consider that it would be well or wise for the present to change the name of our Association.”8 Although details of the internal controversy regarding its naming are not known, Inoue’s words showed that there was a dispute among members of the WPAJ about the advisability, and pace, of affiliation with WILPF. Mary Elkinton Nitobe (1857–1938) was a Quaker social activist from Philadelphia and the wife of internationalist Nitobe Inazô (1862–1933) and had supported Japanese women in their organization of the WPAJ. A letter she wrote to Jôdai Tano was further evidence that women of the WPAJ wavered over the issues of its affiliation with WILPF, as well as over the direction of the WPAJ under national and international pressures. She wrote, “I very strongly desire international co-operation, but I also very well know that it is extremely unwise to put too much pressure upon the little group just formed, to go in any one direction until they have made a clear survey of the field and have made up their own minds what they can conscientiously adopt and adhere to.” Nitobe further advised them not to increase the speed of the women’s movement at the expense of recklessly accepting the direction of the Western women’s movement—at least, she wrote, “until you are quite free to give yourself to the cause.” She was aware of the difficulties in

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promoting a women’s movement in Japan and suggested they should take account of cultural and historical differences between the West and Japan when deciding how to advance the peace movement.9 The direction of the WPAJ was reflected in its constitution, which did not use strong language, either to protest against war or to argue for women’s suffrage.10 Ambiguously enough, this constitution, written in English, indicated middle-class Japanese women’s decision both to pursue their own direction and pace of involvement in the peace movement and simultaneously to maintain international ties. Even the naming of the WPAJ indicated that the Japanese branch of WILPF would reserve the right to choose their own initiatives in the peace movement, based on the nature and pace of development in Japanese national politics. Even for some conservative members of the WPAJ, who like Inoue advocated a gradual course in empowering women, peace activism brought a rare opportunity to participate in international politics, something they were usually denied. Moreover, international contacts with Western women activists provided an opportunity to be exposed to, and to deal with, cultural and gender issues that were not being discussed in Japan at that time. This illuminated the similarity of women’s concerns, based on shared notions rooted in Christian social activism of gender roles as mothers and caregivers. At the same time, it shed light on institutionalized differences in the political status of enfranchised and unenfranchised women. Eventually, seeing themselves reflected in this international window, Japanese women deepened their understanding of themselves as women, and clarified their relationship with their nationalistic and militaristic state. More importantly, as Inoue’s letter suggested, members of the WPAJ pragmatically and carefully crafted their activism in a way that would be accepted within both the international and the national discourses of the peace movement. To promote peace, WPAJ women had to deal with the double identity of an international community and a Japanese one. Inherent in this were difficulties in dealing with the tension between Western-style feminism, which while doubtless not entirely free of nationalism, pursued both peace and equality across national borders, and nationalism in its fullest sense, which tended to limit women’s social activism to pursuing nationalist interests only. For Japanese women peace activists in the sociopolitical conditions of the era, promoting peace was a difficult juggling act. Nevertheless, their determination to reconcile the conflicting causes of peace, feminism, and nationalism led to the emergence of a specifically Japanese-style feminist consciousness. This was ironic, as nationalism

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in many ways negated women’s rights. Caught in an ambiguous position, navigating between nationalism and promoting Western-style feminism, the women wanted to create a feminist movement that took into account their cultural and historical differences: culturally specific traits that were not addressed in the discourse of Western feminism, such as the expectation of women’s obedience in the family-state “good wife and wise mother” ideology. In a 1927 letter, Inoue noted that “Japanese women work in a different way to methods used in the West, but their way is what seems to be best suited to the need[s] of Japan.”11 What she meant by “the need[s] of Japan” is unclear, but Inoue was defending their approach to promoting peace in Japan, one that attempted to resolve the tension between national and international interests.

No Peace without Equality The discourse of the international women’s peace movement, which eventually extended to Japanese women, was given a transatlantic arena with the founding of WILPF in 1915. As we have seen, in the face of the crisis in Western civilization and in the shadow of World War I, around 1,500 women from twelve countries from Europe and the United States gathered in The Hague to promote peace. This first international women’s peace meeting, the International Congress of Women (later the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, WILPF) pledged women’s responsibility to initiate a better world order. These women identified that international differences emerging from economic competition, expanding international trade, increasing population, and changes in sociopolitical standards were the sources of international disputes. They then adopted a series of resolutions, including women’s support for the peaceful solution of international disputes; for the promotion of international goodwill and peace education in the school and family; and for democratic control of foreign policies. Moreover, the activists argued that to pursue these resolutions effectively, women’s equal participation in politics was required. They noted that “since the combined influence of the women of all countries is one of the strongest forces for the prevention of war, and since women can only have full responsibility and effective influence when they have equal rights with men, this International Congress of Women demands their political enfranchisement.”12 In so doing, the congress clarified that the goal of the peace movement envisaged by women was the interlinked achievement of peace and equality. Writing on the specific nature of women’s peace activism, American social justice reformer and the president of the congress, Jane Addams noted:

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It is possible that the appeal for the organization of the world upon peaceful lines has been made too exclusively to man’s reason and sense of justice, quite as the eighteenth century enthusiasm for humanity was prematurely founded on intellectual sentiment. Reason is only a part of the human endowment; emotion and deep-set racial impulses must be utilized as well, those primitive human urgings to foster life and to protect the helpless, of which women were the earnest custodians, and even the social and gregarious instincts that we share with the animals themselves. These universal desires must be given opportunities to expand and the most highly trained intellects must serve them rather than the technique of war and diplomacy.13 Addams’s view of women’s special suitability for the peace cause was derived from a critique of the discourse of civilization, which she saw as placing too much emphasis on reason and science, thereby creating global sociopolitical, economic, and cultural problems. Addams asserted that women’s roles as mother and caregiver based on emotion and “deep-set racial impulses,” which she clarified as being the universal human instinct to protect life, were a necessary balancing force. Thus women were primary agents for the peace movement. Yet as Japanese women were to make clear, the Western women’s peace movement operated under a fundamentally different understanding of women’s roles in society and a sharply different critique of the discourse of civilization. For Jane Addams, women’s place in society originated in their traditional role as “fostering Mother,” particularly in a mother’s moral duty and desire to secure food in the daily domestic routines of life. She thought that while men across the world considered food as the means to control the economy and as a commodity, women regarded it as a form of nurturance. It was a logical development for Addams that women’s concerns for food and the welfare of humanity expressed themselves in women’s activism in the public sphere. Addams noted that just as “women entered into politics when clean milk and the premature labor of children became factors in political life, so they might be concerned with international affairs when these at last were dealing with such human and poignant matters as food for starving peoples who could be fed only through international activities.”14 Addams was highlighting what she saw as women’s particular moral duties and responsibilities in the family, and also in both domestic and international communities. And yet she did not see these roles as conflicting with each other, because each originated from women’s desire for peaceful human life.

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Sharing this desire for peace, 1,500 women from warring and neutral states congregated at The Hague. Addams said in her presidential address that they belonged to “the human race as a whole, and constitute a spiritual internationalism which surrounds and completes our national life, even as our national life itself surrounds and completes our family life: they do not conflict with patriotism on one side any more than family devotion with it upon the other.”15 Thus Addams believed that whatever lives women engaged themselves in, their struggles based on humanitarian concerns became the main outlet for the peace cause. This inclusive view of women’s universal roles facilitated international communication with the members of the Women’s Peace Association in Japan, even though they confined themselves to Japanese concerns.

The Buildup to the Foundation of the Women’s Peace Association in Japan In the fall of 1915, WILPF made the earliest drive to recruit Japanese women and men to an international peace movement network. Those included Mary Elkinton Nitobe; Tsuda Umeko; Yajima Kajiko, the head of the JWCTU; and Naruse Jinzô, the male president of Japan Woman’s University.16 For example, WILPF, at the time called the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), asked Tsuda Umeko to introduce some Japanese women who would be prepared to support their peace cause. In addition to contacting men of the Japan Peace Association, Emily Hobhouse (1860–1926), acting secretary of the ICWPP, earnestly invited Tsuda and Japanese women to participate in the peace movement, writing, “we should like to cooperate with women of all civilized nations. . . . We should deeply regret if Japan were not represented among the other nations on International work of such scope and importance.”17 This transcultural recruitment of women for the peace cause was followed up by Chrystal Macmillan (1872–1937), secretary of the ICWPP. Macmillan was delighted to learn that Tsuda had begun to form a peace association, noting, “It would be a great strength to our organization to know that we had a Society working in the same spirit in your country. . . . [T]he question of goodwill and cooperation between the people of the East and the peoples of the West is of great importance for international permanent peace.”18 Macmillan was pleased because the ICWPP believed that women who had different experiences in their respective societies and civilizations could work together to strengthen the peace cause.

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This invitation led Tsuda and Mary Elkinton Nitobe to send a joint letter to Aletta Jacobs with a list of several Japanese women who might be interested in the peace movement.19 Tsuda and Nitobe’s nominees were educated and either Christian or sympathetic to Christianity, including JWCTU activists such as Yajima Kajiko, YWCAJ women such as Kawai Michi (1877– 1953), and educators such as Hatoyama Haruko (1861–1938) and Yamawaki Fusako (1867–1935). Through this network of Japanese middle-class women with Christian sympathies and access to Western culture, the imported discourse of the peace movement promoted by Western middle-class liberal women had the potential to spread into Japan.20 However, this did not mean that these Japanese women supported the ICWPP with exactly the same understanding of what was involved in an international alliance as their Western counterparts. The selection of Hatoyama and Yamawaki, who had not supported the woman’s suffrage cause in 1912, showed that gender equality was not fully incorporated into the peace cause in Japan. Unlike women of the ICWPP, who linked the universality of women’s oppressed position in society with the massive violations of human rights in war, for some Japanese women, the concept of an international gender alliance was not fully comprehended. Although they responded quickly and positively to the Western women’s request, Tsuda and Nitobe predicted in the same letter to Aletta Jacobs that Japanese women were not likely to go along with the Western peace movement for the time being. They wrote: As present the Peace Movement though well started among men, has not been taken up at all by our women. It is of course, most desirable they should do so, and a few of us plan to meet at an early date to consider what work is possible towards the establishment of a National Women’s Peace Association in Japan. We believe that this is possible but it will all be pioneer work and take much time. We do not think it is possible that our members can do work at present in International lines, nor would it be feasible for them to join in the proposed congress which you are planning to have meet at the end of the war. The only thing possible is a National Association for Peace, but we should be glad to keep in touch with work in other lands and know of what is being done abroad.21 As Tsuda hinted, starting a peace movement required Japanese women to transcend the norms of their gender code. And even if a start could be made

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with the formation of “a National Association for Peace,” it did not necessarily mean that Japanese women immediately supported all WILPF’s ideas. Tsuda warned that Japanese women’s support for the peace movement, unlike that of their Western counterparts, would not at the time be based on an internationalist feminist consciousness or a concept of universal equality and peace. Instead, Japanese women would support the peace movement within the framework of Japan’s own nationalistic concerns. Compared with Western women’s enthusiastic desire to form a women’s international peace network, Japanese women’s cautious reaction in general indicated different understandings about peace issues and women’s roles in society. That is, even though Japan had lived through three wars since the end of the nineteenth century—the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), and World War I (1914–1918)— many middle-class Japanese women leaders were still ambivalent about war. The fact that battlefields were located overseas obscured the atrocities of war in Japan, and the awareness that “its military and naval might approach world standard”22 increased both national pride and Japan’s international reputation for having successfully modernized. This pride and spirit, based on national feeling but with an increasing degree of jingoistic nationalism, had continued to form the distinctive social climate since the time Tsuda Umeko wrote in 1895 of “the intense spirit of patriotism existing in every part of Japan, in every rank. It is the great feeling that rules the life of the nation, pervading every home and every heart.”23 In addition to this nationalist sentiment, the notion of “good wife and wise mother”24 did not allow women to mourn the loss of their husbands and sons who were killed in war. Rather, individual loss had to be considered secondary to the nation’s overall welfare. Making this sort of national avowal for warfare clear, Tsuda had (again in 1895) explained that “to unduly mourn for one whose life had been given to his country was to show a lack of patriotism. . . . [For] the true wife or mother to grudge the life is to fall short of the highest standards. . . . In almost every case the only regret expressed is that the dead soldier had not been spared to do more for the country’s cause.”25 Because of this underlying stress on nationalism among the Japanese that ran unbroken from individual pride through to national pride, it was difficult for many Japanese women to claim that human loss and war infringed on the rights of women and humanity in general. This was the family-state ideology in action and embodied in people’s lives. However, in the period during and after the Russo-Japanese War, a number of women directly opposed conflict. The poet Yosano Akiko (1878– 1942) expressed her antiwar feeling through a poem in 1904 in which she

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called on her younger brother not to be killed or kill in the Russo-Japanese War.26 Women of the Heiminsha (Commoners’ Society, formed in 1903), including Fukuda Hideko, supported the Heiminsha’s antiwar stand.27 In the 1910s, Tsuda Umeko demonstrated her own pacifist position by supporting the ICWPP, subscribing to its newsletter, and initiating a peace association. These activities showed that Tsuda herself envisioned the peace movement as an essential part of and guide to the women’s rights movement. In her 1916 academic commencement address, Tsuda encouraged her graduating students to take action for the peace movement: Should not the splendid spirit of European women in their terrible struggle inspire us? Shall we not prepare ourselves and be able to go out and join the efforts which that time demand? Or shall Japanese women remain always as mere lookers on, like uncomprehending children? In all movements to better woman’s position and enlarge her sphere, the most important point at issue always is the worth and ability of the woman herself.28 Tsuda was shrewd enough to point out the indifference to issues of social justice current among intelligent, bourgeois women, despite their having had opportunities to acquire knowledge about Western women’s social activism. She believed that women’s involvement in the peace movement was the most practical and enlightening way to encourage Japanese women to liberate themselves from the restrictive circumstances and complacency offered by conventional Japanese notions of womanhood. For Tsuda, compassion toward the sufferings of Western women ought to blossom into the creation of a new feminist consciousness in Japanese women, which would ultimately foster an internationalist feminist consciousness in them. Tsuda did support WILPF for a short period, but the development of a peace association was halted because of her illness in 1917. Although Mary Elkinton Nitobe took over the lead, her move to Europe in 1920 once again impeded the progress of organization.29 Despite the efforts of Tsuda and Nitobe, the lack of strong leadership for the peace cause indicated that Japanese middle-class feminists found it difficult to place international humanitarianism above national feeling and nationalism. In fact, Kawakami Isamu, general secretary of the Japan Peace Society, the male-led peace organization, maintained Japanese communication with WILPF until the foundation of the women’s association became solid. Eventually, as we have seen, middle-class Japanese women did succeed in forming the Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai (Women’s Peace Association in Japan;

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WPAJ) in May 1921. A large number of the members of the association were composed of alumnae of the Japan Woman’s University, the Ofu-Kai, including Inoue Hideko (1875–1963) and Jôdai Tano (1886–1982); WCTU member Gauntlett Tsune; and YWCA member Hayashi Uta (1864–1946).30 Many of these founding members were first taught by Naruse Jinzô and had belonged to the Women’s Study Group of International Issues in 1919, led by Nitobe Inazô and Mary Elkinton Nitobe.31 These facts indicate that behind the formation of the association was an ideological identification with Christian social activism and a continuity with the social reform activism that the JWCTU had practiced since the late nineteenth century.32

In Japanese Women’s Own Image Even when formally constituted, the ideology underpinning the WPAJ was similar to but distinct from that of WILPF. Different meanings evolved to reflect the sociocultural conditions of Japan in the 1920s. More precisely, the particularity of the peace consciousness of WPAJ women essentially came from a close identification with national feeling. Inoue Hideko, who was chosen as the chairperson for the WPAJ at the inaugural meeting, noted, “The ideas of the Association are: the enlightenment of women; the recognition of woman’s mission in life; and the formation of spiritual unity under the notion of the peace cause.” Her identification with the state can be seen to some extent in her observation that the “imminent task [for the WPAJ] was to make exclusive efforts for the promotion of good-will relations between the United States and Japan.”33 Although WILPF women also used the terms “woman’s mission” and “good-will,” these words conveyed different meanings when they were introduced into Japan. The notion of women being tied together by sharing the common objective of gender equality, which was a crucial part of WILPF ideology, was subsumed into the conventional notion of womanhood in Japan, which placed more emphasis on the direct link between women and the state. This cultural distance between Japan and the United States contributed to a mental barrier between women on both sides. For example, in 1921 the WPAJ approved WILPF’s platform but did not choose to become a branch of WILPF until 1924. The WPAJ also did not agree to promote the suffrage movement in Japan.34 Their American counterparts were puzzled, as illustrated by Emily Balch (1867–1961) in her 1921 letter to Kawakami Isamu: Since you [the WPAJ] say that you approve of our programme and are eager to aid in our work I cannot see why you should not

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count yourself one with us from the beginning for in union there is strength. We certainly need you and I hope that you need us. To speak now for myself personally I should like to say that as an American and in view of the efforts to make trouble between two countries who ought to be the best of friends and in active cooperation, I am always particularly interested in efforts to create fruitful contacts between Japan and the countries of Western culture. It is one of the encouraging features of the day that there is a beginning to be more comprehension of the fact that the West has so much to learn from the East.35 Balch believed that allying internationally was beneficial for women on all sides and that women’s friendship based on mutual need and cooperation had the force to reform society. Yet she needed time to fully understand the fact that women in different cultures lived under different gender codes, which did not allow all women to support a single cause, even if those women accepted the principle behind the cause. However, this ideological division was temporary. It can be seen as an essential step toward understanding that differences were not necessarily problems. That is, women’s interests were diversified in different cultures and the scope of the peace movement therefore expanded as it crossed national borders. In fact, Japanese women’s gradually increasing involvement in WILPF showed that they chose to promote the peace movement in accordance with the pace of progress of public opinion. Since the era’s sociopolitical culture was not ready to accept a “political” women’s movement with peace as its central agenda, they thought it was unwise for their organization to be associated with other, more politicized women’s rights organizations like the New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai) and the Red Wave Society (Sekirankai).36 The bottom line was that in addition to the official notion of womanhood, in practice Japanese laws actually banned women’s political participation. It was still at that time illegal for them to join political parties, to attend and to promote political meetings, and to speak on political matters in public. In such misogynous sociopolitical conditions, for the fledgling WPAJ, accepting all the terms of WILPF seemed too radical. The WILPF platform was entirely political and it put forward a strong critique of nationalism. Indeed, reporting on the inauguration of the Association, Jôdai Tano wrote to Emily Balch: I am sending the Constitution of our Society [WPAJ], and hope you will understand what we Japanese women aim [for] at present. I tried

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my best to interpret to my associates your point of view regarding the international purpose after looking through the materials you kindly sent me. And I know we are all interested in what you are doing, and should all like to study it further. But what we decided is that we should begin with the international education among our children and especially among our own country women, and at the same [time] we should a little more thoroughly investigate the women’s movement abroad.37 Without question WILPF’s agenda was too controversial, even among the otherwise sympathetic members of the WPAJ, for them to immediately give it unanimous support. They were cautious about applying unchanged the methods of “the women’s movement abroad,” even though they understood the underlying principles of the peace cause promoted by WILPF. This tension led women reformers to implement WILPF plans for securing peace selectively and in stages, taking account of their view of national conditions. It was with this sense of cautiousness that the WPAJ women wrote its constitution: “Constitution of the Woman’s Association in Japan for International Friendship.” As its title indicated, they emphasized “international friendship” rather than “international peace.” Likewise, they modified the notion of gender equality, stipulating in the constitution that their purpose was “to raise the general standards of women.” Emphasizing the nonpolitical aspects of peace work, the WPAJ women separated peace from the more radical agendas of suffrage and woman’s rights. Certainly, they primarily articulated the WILPF commitment to promoting international goodwill. To pursue this purpose, the WPAJ engaged in nonpolitical peace activism, including fund-raising campaigns for Armenian refugees displaced as a result of conflicts over the end of the Ottoman Empire; hosting receptions of international visitors to Japan; and inaugurating international education for Japanese children, all of which were deemed suitable according to the norms of Japanese womanhood described earlier. By using this approach the WPAJ women aimed to gain as much public support as possible for the peace movement, thereby hoping to create the foundation for what could become a broader women’s rights movement in Japan. Confident that the WPAJ needed to pursue such a gradual and sensible strategy before fully affiliating with WILPF, Inoue wrote that “Japanese women work in a different way to methods used in the West.”38 Thus, the members of the WPAJ were determined to facilitate the peace movement by standing on a middle ground that they saw as realistic and appropriate for both national and international peace causes. While this trade-off may be

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seen as too compromising from a radical perspective, it nevertheless shows that pressures on women from the nationalistic demands of the state ironically had the effect of speeding up the emergence of feminist consciousness as it refocused in response to it.

Women Pacifists in International Politics Although WPAJ women began the peace movement primarily using the principle of goodwill rather than a political view of peace, it was becoming clear that such a passive or static approach was less tenable when they had to deal with criticism about Japan’s militaristic ambitions in the world, and respond to reports of increasing American racism against Japanese immigrants in the United States. Moreover, the changing face of international relations between the powers of the era required more proactive roles for these Japanese women peace activists. Japan had gained some recognition for its diplomatic (as opposed to military) internationalism for being one of the founding states of the League of Nations and with Nitobe Inazô’s appointment as its undersecretary-general. The focus on peace negotiations and naval limitation among the powers led the United States to hold the Washington Conference between 1921 and 1922. Against this background, International Disarmament Week (November 4 to 11, 1921) became the first testing ground, in terms of international meetings, for the WPAJ women to demonstrate their feminist consciousness. Exclusion from the male-oriented Washington Conference (November 12, 1921, to February 6, 1922) stimulated WILPF to call for all national sections of WILPF to work simultaneously for universal disarmament. They wanted to influence public opinion to encourage disarmament during International Disarmament Week, which would exert influence on the Washington Conference.39 Japanese women’s support for the discourse of disarmament was crucial, particularly in promoting goodwill between the United States and Japan in the midst of increasing anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. In recognition of this, Jane Addams and WILPF asked Japanese women to participate in a women’s conference in Washington. “We beg [the women of Japan to work with] the peace-loving women of the Western countries against national rivalries and the propaganda of race hatred and for the fullest measure of disarmament and the most cordial relations between peoples.”40 Addams pointed out that a massive racist violation of human rights had the same origin as war crimes, even if it happened within the United States. She requested that Japanese women’s humanitarian concerns against racial discrimination in the United States and against Japanese

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militarism be voiced in international meetings. Similarly, the chairperson of the Women’s Committee for World Disarmament, Emma Wold, sent a letter to the WPAJ that encouraged Japanese women to “bring a message from Japanese people to us.”41 Charged with fulfilling their international roles and responsibilities in the international campaign to promote peace, the WPAJ and the JWCTU selected delegates for the women’s peace conference, including Inoue Hideko and Yajima Kajiko. The New York Times described Yajima carrying a peace message from Japanese women to their Western counterparts: “Japanese womanhood prays for the success of the Washington conference and the dawn of a new epoch of higher and better understanding between nations.” The Times further wrote that she would distribute in Washington five thousand fliers titled “The Messenger of the Goddess of Peace.”42 Yajima submitted a peace petition with the signatures of ten thousand Japanese women to U.S. president Warren Harding at the White House and attended various peace meetings.43 At the same time, in the disarmament meetings, Inoue argued that Japan’s general public opposed militarism, and that both American and Japanese women supported peace from their perspective as mothers. She used this idea about Japanese people sharing the same interests as American people in promoting peace, to point out “the illegitimacy of racial discrimination against Japanese immigrants.”44 In this way Inoue articulated that Japan’s militarism and American racism against Japanese immigrants were both examples of the kind of inhumane conduct that impeded peace. She asked American people, and women in particular, to take a critical position against such inhumanity. These middle-class Japanese women’s participation in the peace dialogues and meetings resulted in an understanding and confidence between them and their American counterparts that was increasingly mutual. Regardless of cultural differences, both sides recognized that they had in common the notion of “mother’s duty” as a motivating force for the peace cause. In 1924, WILPF sent a circular letter to Japanese women, which urged “You,—women, mothers! . . . Unite together in this one sacred cause and fulfill the one great duty of the mothers of the world: overcome war!”45 Similarly, a JWCTU leader, Moriya Azuma, who accompanied Yajima Kajiko to the United States, emphasized that the peace petition demonstrated that “there exist sincerely peace loving mothers and women in Japan, in contrast to the widely perceived notion among American people: Japan is a state of militarist men.”46 Japanese peace activists endeavored to make a clear distinction between Japanese women’s activities and Japanese government policies.

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Thus, it was clear that middle-class Japanese women’s understanding of the Western peace discourse facilitated their conceptual liberation from the restraining official notion of womanhood. Of course, Japanese pacifists such as Inoue had extended exposure to a nationalistic version of “motherly duty,” which saw women as suppliers of soldiers and workers to the state. However, coexisting with this prevailing ideology was a growing conception of women and mothers as actors seeking peace in the international community. The self-image of women as nurturers of life connected women in the West and Japan who were engaged in the peace cause. More importantly, the peace activism in Washington created an awakening, in that it was an opportunity to critically review women’s relation to the state, and to gain further insight into militarism and the state in Japan. This insight helped Japanese women begin to seek a new concept, which emerged as an internationalist peace cause intended to replace the previous nationalistic one. Anticipating this transformation, Jôdai Tano wrote in 1922, “In view of the current unstable world situation, we [Japanese women] must undauntedly join up with women of the world to promote social activism. Also, at the same time, at home, we must try hard to work together to raise self-consciousness. Indeed, the urgent task is to lead our women to have internationally insightful knowledge.”47 Although Japanese women had no access to direct political power within Japan, the fact that the WPAJ women made their debut as peace activists during the disarmament meetings indicated that they were well able to take political action and perform their duty and responsibilities within the international community. In this way, crosscultural contact for peace led the activists to reimagine their duty as part of an international, rather than just a national community.

Expanding Spaces for Peace Activism By the 1930s, Japanese women’s discourse about the peace movement had made the transition from a national to an international perspective. This was synchronized with increasing communication with the members of WILPF and friendship between individual American and Japanese women, including Jane Addams, Emily Balch, Carrie Chapman Catt, Jôdai Tano, Inoue Hideko, Wada (Kôra) Tomi (1896–1993), and Gauntlett Tsune. These exchanges were important for the growing sense of international responsibility felt by Japanese women. Jane Addams’s visit to Japan in 1923 imparted momentum to the peace movement in Japan in general. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun introduced her as

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Figure 3.1. Wada Tomi and Jane Addams in the guest room of Osaka Asahi Shimbun, 1923, looking at woodblock prints by Hiroshige. (Source: Kôra Rumiko, ed., Sekaiteki ni nobiyakani shashinshû Kôra Tomi no kôdôteki shôgai [Tokyo: Domesu, 2003], 9. Courtesy of Kôra Rumiko.)

“the Mother of Peace,”48 and she received a warm welcome (see Figure 3.1). Behind the public’s excitement was their desire for peace and for increased spending on social welfare. There was increasing anxiety for peace among women in particular. In Jôdai’s view in a letter to Emily Balch in 1923, this trend was “women of Japan just awakening to pay much more attention to the international problem and decidedly more interested in the women’s movement of the world.”49 Wada Tomi’s observation in a letter of the same year to Jane Addams was that “the women of Japan have been very keen toward these questions in these few years and ever so anxious to hear about any women’s activity for peace and freedom.”50 It seems certain that the Washington Conference and Japanese women’s peace activism had generated this high level of consciousness about peace among people. In this social climate, Jane Addams’s speeches on peace were a powerful spur in advancing the peace movement for WPAJ women.51 At home, deprived of full citizenship, WPAJ women were limited in their ability to participate in the full range of peace activities along with WILPF. Nevertheless, WPAJ women managed to enlarge the scope of “good-will.” In addition to entertaining foreign visitors, the WPAJ expanded its efforts,

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promoting friendship with women in China by inviting Chinese students to Japan, visiting China, and sending money to Chinese women. They also promoted peace and international education in schools by advising the government to use textbooks that did not include militaristic and nationalistic language and planning a peace exhibition to disseminate the idea of peace. These activities at home showed WPAJ women’s increasingly strong desire to promote peace on internationalist lines. Japanese peace activists were able to take more active and political roles when operating internationally than those they could take at home. This helped them to deepen their insights into “women’s place” and roles located in modern civilizations that were increasingly integrated geopolitically and economically. Attending conferences meant more for Japanese women than merely confirming international goodwill. As they came to realize that injustice was the common root at the heart of struggles for peace, race, gender, and class equality in the increasingly globally linked economic system of the time, entering into a gender alliance to address such issues led to the necessity of forming a cross-class women’s movement in Japan. Japanese women were helped in formulating these convictions by dialogue and cooperation in international women’s conferences: for example, in the Fourth WILPF Congress in Washington in 1924; the Fifth WILPF Congress in Dublin in 1926; the First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu in 1928, chaired by Jane Addams; and the Fifth National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW) in Washington in 1930, organized by Carrie Chapman Catt. For the Japanese pacifist counterparts of WILPF, such experiences further nurtured feminist consciousness. For Jôdai Tano, for example, increasingly direct contacts with Western feminists through peace activism resulted in a deepening insight into the relations between women and into what room was realistically available for activism in an increasingly militarized Japanese state. Indeed, Jôdai not only gained critical perspectives via international contacts and WILPF conferences but also contributed to them. At the 1926 Dublin Congress, she delivered her analysis of militarism and imperialism in Japan. She argued that social problems and the expansion of militarism in Japan were parallel and interrelated phenomena, both serving the interests of world powers. She laid out Japan’s issues, including poverty, food shortages, overpopulation, women’s working conditions, and child labor, and demonstrated their links with the world economy. She then asserted that the united women’s movement could change the direction of national policies, away from militarism and toward humanitarian and welfare concerns. Jôdai proposed that “what we should do next is to bring about closer cooperation

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among the various organizations and form a united body with which to face the nation in the cause of peace” and observed that “men are too much occupied with material welfare, while women’s minds and hearts are still free from worldly affairs.” She emphasized that the focus of the women’s movement in Japan should be on education and welfare for the people, urging the government to spend money on women’s primary and higher education instead of war preparation. In conclusion she stated, “We shall not be satisfied until the sense of loyalty and self-sacrifice cultivated in the Japanese for centuries be raised to loyalty and self-sacrifice to God and to the cause of Humanity.” Jôdai thus clarified that Japanese feminist consciousness was located in the lineage of Japanese tradition but was emerging at a particular time and place through dialogues with Western women social activists.52 This growing internationalist feminist consciousness among Japanese women was apparent when Gauntlett Tsune attended the Fifth National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW) in Washington in 1930, followed by the London Naval Conference. For Japanese women, who had no vote in national politics, petitioning was the most effective form of demonstrating their political will and the most practical way to show their support for the peace movement. At the NCCCW meeting, Gauntlett and her JWCTU colleague Hayashi Uta exhibited a large number of peace petitions signed by 750,000 Japanese women that demanded “establishing a permanent peace,” explaining that they wanted to present it to the London Naval Conference in February.53 This so impressed the other conference attendees that they decided to collect similar petitions in their own countries, to present along with them. This was the first time that the women’s peace movement united internationally, realizing the potential for petitions to be a powerful tool for peace and sending what was the first unified international message along with them to the London Naval Conference.54 As Ann Zueblin, the international secretary to WILPF, wrote to Jôdai: Altogether the very prominent part played by Japanese women for peace is very evident and has made a great impression over here. The fact that those two Japanese ladies brought all those signatures has roused very great attention to the peace spirit which women are promoting in Japan and it has been very much remarked that the three delegations, namely English, American and Japanese, which were the objects of such strong pressure from the peace societies and specially from the women, have evidently been really affected by this pressure and it has had a sensible effect upon their attitude. The two other countries, France and Italy, where there has not been such

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pressure, have been the two whose delegates have shown themselves less ­conciliatory.55 The significance of these events for Gauntlett was that she realized the extent of the influence of the political movement for which she had been a significant instigator. Although Japanese women were not able to influence national politics directly, they were able to use international channels for activism to put pressure on the Japanese government, as well as on international politics. Gauntlett also talked at the NCCCW meeting about the injustice of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (the Immigration Act of 1924) in the United States, which declared that “no alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States.” In this context, that meant the Chinese and Japanese.56 Representing “many innocent Japanese people who were suffering from the law created by one nation,” Gauntlett asked, “why are American people who set a high value on justice and human rights indifferent with this bad law?” She reported hearing voices in the audience responding with “Yes, yes” and “I never knew anything about it.”57 She was speaking based on her belief, expressed a year earlier, that “the fundamental cause of war was racial discrimination.”58 Yet it is also clear that she was playing the role of unofficial diplomat for Japan. These two examples indicate that the method she used for the peace cause—combining the issues of peace and racial discrimination—was her way to simultaneously pursue national goals and the women’s cause. More importantly, through these experiences in Europe and America, Gauntlett exerted political power of a kind denied her in Japan. Consequently these conferences, while helping Japanese women to gain confidence in promoting the women’s movement on international lines, also made them recognize their oppressed position and the necessity of a strong women’s movement in Japan. Realizing this, Gauntlett wrote, “I wonder when we will be able to carry out the women’s movement ardently and sincerely. . . . The problem is not others’ but ours.”59

Combining a Nuanced Strategy with a Middle Way Although Gauntlett was vice chair of the WPAJ in 1930, she attended the NCCCW as a private person.60 The reason she did not represent the WPAJ is not known, but this example may indicate that as Japanese feminists in the era were making contact with a spectrum of American and European w ­ omen’s organizations, from the radical WILPF to the conservative

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NCCCW, they chose how to do so on a case-by-case basis. Such international women’s networks wanted to involve Japanese women in the peace movement, and this was matched by Japanese feminists’ eagerness to reach out. But they linked themselves selectively, based on their own specifically Japanese concerns. Through dialogues between women in the West and in Japan, the relationship between the international and the national was being redefined. This ambiguous zone between borders provided a space where middle-class Japanese women were able to activate their own particular conception of the peace movement. With the freedom it lent, they were able to shape their own narrative by combining meta-narratives, including the notions of “good wife and wise mother” and “feminism,” formulating their own interpretations of them along the way. Women activists such as Gauntlett belonged to multiple organizations beyond the JWCTU, working on issues including peace and suffrage. They began to create a network composed of different groups with different methods, which overall promoted women’s rights holistically. In so doing, these women were able to negotiate a space in which they could both coexist with the government and pursue a wide range of women’s rights issues. In combining these organizations it was made clear that each problem was rooted in modern patriarchy. However, negotiating with the government had its limitations, since the political life of Japanese women was minimized by the state. Some initiatives were seen as realistic, and some were not. For example, in response to the WILPF request to support the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact (a multilateral peace treaty), the WPAJ advised the government “to accept it promptly,”61 whereas the WPAJ was not able to meet WILPF’s request to oppose “the imprisonment of men who refused to perform military service,” which they knew would be seen in Japan as highly antinational and political. Frustrated by their limiting situation, Jôdai wrote, “We would be rather powerless to take any action in this direction.”62 Such limitations were obvious when Japan further increased its imperialist ambitions toward China in the 1930s. In the wake of the Manchurian Incident in September 1931, in which part of the Japanese army engineered a spurious justification for invading northern China, the WPAJ sent its representatives to the minister of foreign affairs and the minister of education to encourage them to promote a peace settlement and peace education.63 The WPAJ recognized the futility of its “empty words,” but in its view, amid tightened political censorship, “only mild petitions to the government to bring peace in the earliest possible time” were a feasible way to express its idea of pacifism.64 By contrast, a few of the most radical leftist women’s

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groups explicitly showed their antimilitaristic attitude and tried to mobilize women’s opposition to Japanese encroachment into China.65 The WPAJ also sent letters to Chinese feminists to express their apologies for Japan’s military attack against China and regretted the difficulties in speaking out against militarism in Japan’s sociopolitical conditions.66 The further the Japanese government increased militaristic and nationalist policies, the narrower became the space in which Japanese women could maneuver in pursuing the international aims of peace movement. Although WPAJ women felt that they “have been able to do little effective work [to cooperate with WILPF’s peace activism], owing to the strong so-called patriotic propaganda [pro-war stance],” the WPAJ participated in WILPF’s campaign for the 1932 General Disarmament Conference and collected “some 173,000 signatures for the Disarmament Petition.”67 However, they failed to send it in time and reported only the number of signatures by telegram to WILPF.68 In increasingly restricted circumstances, the WPAJ began again to focus on the politically safer ground of the promotion of goodwill among nations. In 1935 the WPAJ addressed its hopes to the members of WILPF: Wherefore, it seems to us the real hope of peace must be in the youth of the world. If there can be raised up a generation of young people who will overstep the bounds of nationalism to form an international movement so firmly bound by ties of friendship that it can stand against the threats and hatreds of the older generations, then indeed may we hope for world peace.69 Accordingly, the WPAJ asked the principals of girls’ high schools all over Japan to have their students write friendly letters for their counterparts in the United States and China. Five thousand copies of the two selected letters were sent out in 1935. This form of activism was relatively passive, yet the members of WPAJ hoped that the exchange of letters based on goodwill would nurture peace consciousness and mutual understanding among young people. For the same reasons, the WPAJ supported Chinese students in Japan and also held peace song lyric-writing competitions twice. The winning peace song, “Sekai wa nakayoshi,” was translated as “The World Is One Great Family” and sent to WILPF in 1935.70 All of these efforts were based on the WPAJ’s hope to achieve peace in the future. When tensions between nationalism and internationalism reached a critical point, they saw it as crucial that the WPAJ focus attention on bringing up young people to be peace-minded. Jôdai wrote, “Our work in the future will have to be the

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laying of these foundations of international good will, for without them our most earnest endeavors in the cause of peace inevitably fail for the lack of necessary support.”71 By the 1940s, the government was increasingly requiring women to commit themselves to nationalist causes, as we see in more detail in Chapter 5. After Gauntlett chaired the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in 1937, she was appointed president of the Federation of Japanese Women’s Organizations (Nihon Fujin Dantai Renmei), composed of eight women’s organizations including the WPAJ, the JWCTU, the YWCAJ, and the Women’s Suffrage League. This group could perhaps be seen to have certain counter­ hegemonic aspects, as a result of the women’s efforts not to be completely sti­ fled. Women in this group tried to maintain their own initiative and avoid government control, despite being engaged in government civic measures during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Yet the federation ended up supporting the militaristic government on the home front. Gauntlett later lamented her compromise with the government during the war: “It is greatly to be regretted that I was not able to voice objections to the war, in spite of my nearly twenty-five year devotion to the promotion of world peace.”72 The movement had drifted from national feeling toward nationalism. The smaller the ambiguous space they inhabited became, the more limited the WPAJ’s activism became. In the end, the WPAJ’s international peace activism was shelved between 1940 and 1945 to cooperate with the militaristic and nationalist cause, not reemerging until 1947. This reflected similar choices made by some feminists in Britain and the United States and by some socialists, both then and previously, in World War I. There is no doubt that this can be seen as a failure. Nevertheless, the steps that had been taken in the interwar peace movement promoted by the WPAJ show that international contact was important for what Ishimoto Shidzue called in 1941 “building a new future program for our women.”73 WPAJ women gained much more confidence to promote a women’s rights movement in Japan and to join with international efforts. Reporting her experience at the London Disarmament Conference in 1930, Hayashi Uta wrote, “Until that moment, we Japanese women always had to follow the lead set by Western women. However, we seized the initiative in the Disarmament Congress. . . . We became women of the world.”74 Celebrating this enlightening achievement, Inoue wrote to Balch in 1924, “I may say, that women’s work and influence in Japan have so advanced in

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the past two or three years that we do not hesitate so much to participate in [the] international movement with women of the world.”75 Through direct contact, both American and Japanese women strengthened their sense of friendship, their gender identification, and their understanding of different cultures, despite the increasingly pervasive atmosphere of imperialism and militarism.

4

From Private to Public Ishimoto Shidzue and the Birth Control Movement up to 1941 Millions of Japanese women have now come to realize that once they act as a unit [like the Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations], speaking their wishes with a single voice, they can make their influence a very powerful one in new Japan. It is this important development that gives significance to the movement now under way to solve the population problems by the radical methods of Western science. Ishimoto Shidzue, “Women’s Progress in Japan”

Birth control is not a national problem only, but an international one, and we who belong to this civilization must all help each other. Letter from Margaret Sanger to Baroness Ishimoto, March 3, 1938

O

f all the forms of social activism across the world in the period between the world wars, the birth control movement shed the most light on the fact that women’s privacy was constrained by the state. At its juncture with the woman’s body, the state regarded woman’s reproduction as a legitimate object of control, used to increase or to decrease its population; in opposition, birth control activists sought to empower women to control their own bodies and fertility. One early test of this came in 1916 in Brooklyn, New York, when Margaret Sanger opened her birth control clinic targeting working-class women. To avoid unwanted pregnancies she planned to provide information and methods for birth control to those women who had limited access to it. Awareness of the idea of spacing out childbearing and knowledge about how to go about it had so far only been disseminated by stealth among middle-class women, but Margaret Sanger wanted birth control for all. In response, to restrict this, the U.S. government enforced the antiobscenity Comstock Act of 1873 (named for the “social purity” crusader Anthony

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Comstock), which banned sending contraceptive information through the mail. Opponents of birth control were against the fact that this would empower women to control their own sexuality by separating reproduction from sexual intercourse. In this obstructive environment Margaret Sanger made use of the popularity of neo-Malthusian ideas about controlling population to ensure adequate resources and of eugenics theories regarding improving the genetic health of the population to promote the cause.1 For example, quoting a eugenicist’s theory, she wrote, “Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is a mechanism which has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit,”2 indicating that birth control was a means to decrease the number of the “unfit.” At a time when people were worried that the increasing number of poor immigrants to the United States threatened to overwhelm the Anglo-American population, Sanger used eugenics theory to promote birth control among poor immigrant women. In this way, she took advantage of elite Americans’ worries about “race suicide” and fears about the birth rate of their own “race” declining. In the historian Linda Gordon’s analysis, many middle-class reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accepted “racist” rhetoric as a strategy to pursue their goals. Likewise, birth control activists “were not attracted to eugenics because they were racists; rather they had interests in common with eugenicists and had no strong tradition of anti-racism on which to base a critique of eugenics.”3 The historian Ellen Chesler, whose work on Sanger’s complex character is more convincing, writes that “Margaret Sanger was never herself a racist, but she lived in a profoundly bigoted society” and she did not “repudiate prejudice unequivocally.”4 Sanger’s strategic choice seems clearly wrong from today’s perspective, but it can be argued both that Sanger was not alone among birth control advocates in linking the birth control cause with eugenics and that she was especially pragmatic. In Japan, meanwhile, it was not only working-class women who encountered obstacles to control their own reproduction and sexuality but all women across the social spectrum. The birth control movement was not officially illegal. However, policies aimed at increasing the population were socially and politically enforced by heavy pressure on women. To make Japan a strong imperial power, labor and military recruits were needed, and thus the government encouraged large families. This in turn made it difficult for working-class women to control their sexuality and reproduction, leaving many of them encumbered with children and living in abject poverty. Among middle-class women the family system, under the civil and legal code and the ideology of ideal womanhood, did not allow women to develop

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a notion of personal sovereignty. Moreover, women’s status as second-class citizens kept them away from public channels that might have enabled them to promote policies to empower women. These obstacles made it difficult for Japanese women to gain control over their bodies. To undo what she saw as the virtual “enslavement” of women, Ishimoto Shidzue promoted the Japanese birth control movement by applying Sanger’s U.S. model to what was quite a different situation from that of the United States in the early 1920s.5 For Ishimoto, the birth control movement was designed to disengage women from government policies that used their bodies as mere tools. This chapter deals with how Ishimoto navigated around such obstacles to reach and implement her ideas and adapted neo-Malthusianism to promote the birth control movement. It also shows how she created a particular form of birth control advocacy that recognized the limitations of her own position and that of other women, both in Japan and around the world, responding creatively and imaginatively. In the course of this, Ishimoto demonstrated that the practice of birth control was a means not only to liberate women from patriarchal control at home but also to promote women’s rights across national borders.

Ishimoto Shidzue and the Development of Feminist Consciousness Ishimoto was born as Hirota Shidzue in 1897 in Tokyo. Ishimoto’s father, Hirota Ritarô, was a graduate of the elite Imperial University of Tokyo and a prominent engineer who followed a Western lifestyle. Ishimoto’s mother, Hirota (née Tsurumi) Toshiko, in spite of her educational background at a Canadian mission school, was a traditionalist who believed that “submission was the utmost womanly virtue.”6 Even though the family’s lifestyle and way of thinking were much more Westernized than was common for Japanese people of that era, Ishimoto’s parents, as members of the traditional former samurai class, expected her to become a “good wife and wise mother.” She was educated in the elite Peeress School, from age five until she was sixteen, where the focus of education was to train obedient wives, good mothers, and loyal guardians of Japan’s family system.7 However, her family’s relatively open-minded atmosphere allowed Ishimoto to develop more liberal thinking. Contacts with her uncle, the liberal Tsurumi Yûsuke (1885–1973), and with the internationalist Nitobe Inazô further developed this, and in 1914 she married Baron Ishimoto Keikichi, who was a liberal, Christian social activist in spite of his conservative family background.8

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When Ishimoto married, she hoped to become a supportive wife for the baron. “I was deeply interested in helping [my] husband carry out his humanistic ideals.”9 She hoped to contribute to society by supporting him. Soon after their marriage her conviction was tested. She accompanied her husband to the Miike Coal Mines in Kyûshû between 1915 and 1917, where, while working as an engineer for the Mitsui Mining Company, her husband researched the terrible labor conditions of the miners. Insulated by her privileged life in Tokyo, she was shocked to witness the very different conditions of a mining town. She tolerated her own unaccustomedly difficult situation for three years, until her husband was ordered back to Tokyo because of his poor health. For Ishimoto the second test came in 1919, when Baron Ishimoto went to New York to join the labor movement, where socialists, anarchists, and women’s rights groups were active in Greenwich Village. He asked Ishimoto to join him and encouraged her to study to become an independent thinker as well as a financially independent woman. Leaving their young sons to her mother’s care in Japan, she studied secretarial skills at the Ballard School at the YWCA and associated with liberals and socialists in New York. It was at this time that she first came into contact with American women birth control activists such as Margaret Sanger. By the time she had finished her studies and gone back to Tokyo in 1920, she was ready to “seek economic independence and to propagate birth control education,” although she had to negotiate within the constraints of social class and her family responsibilities.10 However, having been raised by an upper-middle-class family in Tokyo, truly sympathizing with the lives of the working class, such as those she had met in the coalfields of Kyûshû, was not easy for Ishimoto Shidzue. Her initial reaction to “the hard life there among the ignorant and exploited miners” was discomfort.11 She was slow to understand and reluctant to share their woes. But Ishimoto gradually “began to look at the people around me in a new way and tried to see their lives and problems more sympathetically.”12 In the lives of working-class families, overburdened with care and constantly tired and aggrieved, Ishimoto saw “the social evil of poverty.”13 Through her daily experiences in Kyûshû, Ishimoto began to identify linked factors: low-wage competition among laborers, including miners, women, and children; the harsh working and living environment for miners and their families; and women’s double burden, having to work outside and inside the home and encumbered with large families. She saw that they shared a common root cause: poverty. Recalling her experience in Kyûshû, Ishimoto wrote in 1935:

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I often wondered whether the Japanese capitalists were true to their consciences in saying that the beautiful family system in Japan made men, women, and children work harmoniously. . . . Women who were already fully tired from their long day’s labor in the mines returned home to carry pails of water from a distant well to their kitchens. . . . Nothing could be compared to the sight of these crowded nests of ignorance, poverty and misery.14 Observing the lives of these working-class families, Ishimoto began to reconsider and question the rhetoric of the patriarchal family system, embodied in the ie concept of the Japanese household, which was further enforced by the government under capitalism.15 Meeting poverty-stricken women with large families, Ishimoto began to expand the parameters of her social activism to include consideration of the intricate interweaving of class- and gender-based forms of oppression.

Ishimoto’s Encounter with the Discourse of the Birth Control Movement Ishimoto’s experiences at the Miike coalfield prepared her to be immediately receptive when she was exposed to ideas about family planning. When Ishimoto met the American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger in New York in 1920, Sanger’s quiet demeanor and crusading stance attracted her. Ishimoto recalled the day when she first met Sanger: I felt instantly her magnetism and my respect for her deepened as she talked about her difficulties. Listening to her account of the birth control movement, the memory of the overcrowded miners’ huts in Western Japan came back so vividly that the idea of my true mission in life flashed over me.16 As Sanger explained that every woman must have the right to control her own body and fertility, Ishimoto was readily able to associate this with the urgent practical need for family planning in hard-pressed coal mining families in Kyûshû. It was a natural development in Ishimoto’s thinking for her to decide to promote the birth control movement in Japan, declaring, “Yes, Mrs. Sanger’s fight has to be fought in my country too! I will carry the banner for Birth Control in Japan.”17 However, in Japan Ishimoto found it difficult to promote family planning. The Japanese government was pushing for a large population because

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it would lead to increased national power in the form of soldiers and laborers. This state ambition interfered with the spread of birth control knowledge. Even Margaret Sanger, who visited Japan in 1922 to help develop birth control, could not conduct her campaign publicly because of government restrictions. Ironically, however, government prohibition made the existence of the birth control movement newsworthy, when it might not otherwise have been reported. It thus became well known throughout Japan.18 Although Sanger was unable to campaign openly, her visit nevertheless stirred public interest in the family planning movement, which helped Ishimoto and other birth control activists to form organizations. For example, Ishimoto and her husband, Ishimoto Keikichi, together with other proponents of birth control, including the socialist and feminist Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980), Christian reformer and the founder of the Yûaikai (Friendly Society) labor organization Suzuki Bunji (1885–1946), founder of Commoners’ Hospital (Heimin Byôin) and physician Kaji (Katô) Tokijirô (1858–1930), and Christian socialist Abe Isoo (1865–1949), organized the Birth Control Research Society (Sanji Chôsetsu Kenkyûkai) in Tokyo in 1922. This short-lived society began disseminating birth control ideas, issuing one edition of a journal called Shôkazoku (Small Families).19 Working with the society, Ishimoto initially promoted birth control for middle-class women, which became “a cause of alarm to the people of my own class.”20 She insisted on the necessity of spacing out childbearing, “children’s perfect education, the elevation of mothers’ status, and women’s liberation.”21 However, she must have realized that her cause went against the era’s conventional wisdom, which restricted woman’s sexuality. First of all, since childbearing was considered women’s social as well as familial duty,22 middle-class people took exception to her ideas “as the fancy of a romantic person or of one not quite sound in her head.”23 Worse than that, she found that some conservative, nationalist men roundly condemned her for her “unpatriotic” manners, because they thought that “instead of urging my sex to bear as many soldiers—noble patriots—as they possibly could, I was even belittling the military glory of the nation.”24 Such conservative male objections to the dissemination of birth control information and methods were part of a broader attitude that stressed the social control of women’s sexuality. In particular, they feared that if ­middle-class women gained free access to birth control, they might “abuse such knowledge to enjoy sexual intercourse in defiance of ‘woman’s duty of childbearing.’” They warned that this misbehavior would result in a declining birth rate among middle-class families, precisely the people deemed most economically and intellectually suitable to raise children.25 For those

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stalwarts of the middle class who upheld conservative gender and class relations both in the family and in the nation, Ishimoto’s argument for women and birth control was utterly unacceptable. However, the breakthrough in gaining approval of birth control came about not among the middle class but among working-class families when Ishimoto gave a speech in 1923 on birth control to a meeting of the miners’ union in the Ashio Copper Mining Company, which was founded in 1877 by Furukawa Ichibei (1832–1903), who had close ties with government leaders. Ashio copper mines were notorious both for a major environmental disaster in the 1890s and for a violent industrial dispute in 1907, which was quelled by the police and the military.26 Remembering her speech in later life, Ishimoto wrote: I began my speech with a statement of the birth control movement and went on to discuss the ideal of a planned population for the betterment of the human race, voluntary motherhood in its relation to the elevation of women, the necessity for birth control as a means of abolishing injurious abortion, infanticide and everlasting poverty, the connections between birth control and labor problems; and I closed with the moral aspects of the questions.27 Recognizing the presence of the police, who had the authority to break up political meetings when speakers referred to radical ideas, Ishimoto was forced to withdraw the word infanticide because it sounded too strong.28 Ishimoto’s linking of these social and physical problems shows that she associated birth control with neo-Malthusian doctrine and eugenics, referring to the necessity of population control as a means to create “a better human race.” However, as her reference to “voluntary motherhood in its relation to the elevation of women” indicates, she pointed out that the usage of contraception by women was their right to choose. She believed that women should have autonomy in childbearing and control over the welfare of their own bodies and children, asserting that women would thereby actively contribute to the creation of a good society. Ishimoto’s journey toward forming her own personal theory for the birth control campaign is evident in her 1935 autobiography published in the United States. Ishimoto established her ideas through a process of reexamining neo-Malthusian doctrine and Marxism and reading August Bebel’s Women and Socialism. In regard to the neo-Malthusian program, she wrote:

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Questions pertaining to the social system, woman’s position and the relationship between woman and the industrial system still haunted me. I tried to form a theory of my own. . . . To this [August Bebel’s book] I owe the greater part of my birth control theory, especially the thesis that it could be the agency of woman’s emancipation. The NeoMalthusian doctrine had hitherto attracted me to birth control. Nor do I now deny the general adequacy of this doctrine in relating population problems to birth control problems in a capitalistic era, but I cannot now agree with its unconditional assent to the fatal assumptions made by Malthus, who for one thing ignored the creative power of science and the cultural growth of mankind. I was never fully satisfied with the Malthusian doctrine even while I was upholding it.29 In regard to her reading of Marx, she wrote: Next I studied The Philosophy of the Poor by Karl Marx, a theoretical opponent of birth control in that he makes the class war the key to emancipation and well-being. . . . Marx’s theory is that it is the development of capitalism which drives laborers and peasants into extreme poverty and his theory seems to find convincing proof in Japan as elsewhere. . . . Convinced though I was of the value of birth control as a means of emancipating women, protecting motherhood and establishing good eugenic practices, after reading Marx I decided that I had been too narrow in concentrating on its advantages for a single sex. I likewise came to the conclusion that even with a larger acceptance of this agency, the problem of poverty would probably remain. So I became less feministic in a bourgeois way and more humane in my thinking.30 For Ishimoto, neo-Malthusian doctrine provided the initial framework to justify birth control. It seemed for her to offer a practical solution for women to help them break the vicious cycle of poverty and large families. However, feminist theory led her to carefully reexamine neo-Malthusian beliefs and programs for population control. Ishimoto noticed that gender discrimination was implicit in the notion of population control. It ignored women’s agency and dehumanized women by seeing them merely as a means for increasing or decreasing numbers. In short, Ishimoto concluded that both neo-Malthusian doctrine and the notion of population control itself were fundamentally against the principles behind her idea of birth control.

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Although feminist theory allowed Ishimoto to refine her view of the birth control cause as a women’s rights issue, it did not seem enough for her. That is, she realized that merely regulating childbearing would not eliminate poverty. Even if a working-class woman limited the size of her family, she would still not be able to make her way out of poverty because she was also situated at the bottom of the social system organized around patriarchal capitalism. Consequently, Ishimoto situated birth control in a broad, interconnected environment of structural social problems. Yet Ishimoto’s mention of “good eugenic practices” still seems troubling. Viewed from today’s human rights perspective, there are no good eugenic arguments to be made at all. Whoever claims her or his authority to use eugenics is tempted to create a homogeneous population based on her or his discriminatory beliefs. However, careful analysis of her phrase “protecting motherhood and establishing good eugenic practice” suggests one of the eugenics discourses common in her era. This emphasized “the biological premises”—the belief that healthy parents had healthy babies.31 While Ishimoto partly accepted eugenics thought as an approach to biological factors in the health of babies, she felt this was not a complete explanation. Rather she strongly emphasized the socioeconomic factors as underlying justifications for birth control. Ishimoto’s use of the language of eugenics also reflects the sociopolitical tensions and limitations then imposed on women and on activists in general, in that it was necessary to use terms that were popular at the time to avoid meetings being closed down by the police. For example, an article by Yamakawa Kikue from 1922 describes the difficulty of making speeches in public under close police surveillance in the era. Speeches delivered by socialists and laborers in particular were the target of tight government control. Yamakawa explained “how moderately a speaker would have to give a lecture, because once the police found it ‘dangerous’ the lecture was inevitably forced to be canceled.”32 She especially pointed out the merely nominal nature of the freedom conferred by women’s political rights, including the approval of women’s participation in political meetings, which had been newly acquired in 1922: The year 1922 was marked as a victorious year for the women’s rights movement, because women regained the right to participate in political meetings through the revision of Article Five of the Public Peace [Police] Law. However, the revision did not mean the freedom of speech for women.33

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Thus, Yamakawa pointed out that in reality women’s political participation was very minor. They were subject to the general censorship applying to everyone, in that all public speakers had to demonstrate conformity to the prevailing discourse by supporting the existing sociopolitical order and avoiding radical criticism. As a result, freedom of speech was severely compromised. In light of the hostile social environment in 1920s Japan, it can be argued that Ishimoto’s embrace of eugenic language was a strategic choice taken in order to disseminate the ideas of the birth control movement, rather than to support the core ideas of eugenics as such. Sanger certainly used eugenics terms, but there is no definite evidence that she fully embraced them. She responded to practical political realities. In this, Ishimoto followed Sanger’s lead. Taking account of eugenic concerns in the era, Ishimoto indicated that economically, physically, and emotionally, promoting the conditions of mothers might influence the safe delivery of babies, which in turn would contribute to raising healthy children. Both Sanger’s and Ishimoto’s motivation was to secure women’s physical, emotional, and economic health rather than to “eliminate unfit blood” or to achieve “racial purity.” In this sense, these women used eugenic rhetoric but differed both theoretically and practically from those who more generally supported eugenics.34 To sum up, Ishimoto’s vision of birth control theory was not a middleclass feminist model. The primary focus of the middle-class model was lifting the social position of women of their own class, while ignoring the situation of working-class women. Rather, it was a broadened feminist consciousness that targeted the reform of the social structure by cooperating with working-class women. Ishimoto’s theoretical conception of birth control was cross-fertilized with feminist and Marxist analyses, as is apparent from her writing. By “the cultural growth of mankind,” she appeared to hope for two kinds of progress—the first being the elevation of women’s status in society, including women’s autonomy regarding reproduction, and the second being the advent of a more humane society whereby people were not divided into competing groups based on perceived socioeconomic status or gender. Ishimoto thus envisioned a grassroots movement that promoted birth control as a means for achieving broader social reform.

From the Private to the Public Ishimoto’s approach to conducting the campaign indicated that she was motivated by a broad feminist consciousness that encompassed class differences. Coming from a privileged background, how did Ishimoto find common

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ground with women from such different backgrounds? This question again prompts us to explore her private life. By 1923 Ishimoto had already developed confidence as an independent woman through success in her own business—a yarn shop—and in social activism. However, she began to doubt herself when her husband, Ishimoto Keikichi, abandoned his liberal ideology and took on a traditional and patriarchal role within the family. Initially Ishimoto Keikichi had “awakened” Ishimoto to her individuality, encouraging her to see herself as independent of her collective identity as wife and mother. Now he had changed. He demanded that Ishimoto should assume a submissive role as self-sacrificing wife and mother. In Ishimoto’s view, “as the reactionary forces at home [Japan] grew bolder,” he gave up openmindedness and became “captivated by the conventions of his own class.”35 For Ishimoto, her husband’s request seemed to be rooted in the contradictions of a surface modernism underlain with semifeudal norms. The ideal of womanhood embedded in conservative social structures that Ishimoto was being required to assume meant the sacrifice of her individuality. She decried the idea that because “modern capitalism was rashly combined with the deep-rooted feudal forces, all in a flash, liberalism in its complete sense is incapable of free development.”36 Ishimoto realized that this built-in tension between liberalism and conservatism in the modernization of Japan was particularly embodied in reactionary upper-middle-class families like that of Baron Ishimoto, with their support for the “good wife” idea of womanhood, which Ishimoto ironically renamed in a chapter title, “Obedient-Wife-andWise-Mother,” in her book.37 This social pressure pushed Ishimoto to draw back “behind the high wall of feudal family traditions.”38 As she promoted birth control for ­working-class women from the double bind of her own situation, it was becoming clear to her that all women were collectively oppressed under Japan’s patriarchy, regardless of class. Writing of this further development of her feminist consciousness, she explained: I began to conduct myself as a person and not as exploited family property. I disregarded the social prejudices against independent action for a woman. I regarded the birth control movement as the polestar guiding women from slavery and unceasing poverty to personality and culture.39 The birth control movement allowed Ishimoto to apply the insights she had gained among women in the working class to her own class. The two situations in life seemed to mirror each other. Ishimoto, writing of the

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working-class women laboring and living in exploitative conditions in the coalfield, where work and accommodation were tied together, reported that “the people who lived in these barns [sleeping sheds] were strictly watched. . . . It was impossible to run away.”40 She drew a parallel between the great emotional stress on women from their working conditions and that from their situation in the family: under “the tyranny of the family system, women had to be mentally killed.”41 The new feminist consciousness that Ishimoto gained through her own inner conflicts about the traditional family system led her to conclude that women in different classes were exploited economically and culturally—and in the case of laboring women, it was definitely both. Thus all women were collectively oppressed by modern Japanese patriarchy. From the base of this universalized notion of gender oppression, Ishimoto began to look more broadly at women’s roles in Japanese culture and gained an insight as to how women had molded their identities by struggling with restrictive social norms. She came to understand that women had, on a dayto-day basis, cultivated “the power of endurance to a remarkable degree.”42 For example, working-class women worked side by side with men, although they were paid less. Sometimes the work was very physical, they would have to work even when ill, and they were of course also responsible for domestic chores and childcare if they had a family. Mothers of the industrialized working class struggled in harsh living conditions rooted in exploitative capitalism, but they still made efforts to find meaning in life. Such working mothers’ struggles were harder than those of middle-class women, who were likely to be oppressed only by their situation in the patriarchal family system. Ishimoto saw that although middle-class women did not need to work for money, “old-fashion Japanese woman [women] work very hard in [the] house. They have not modern ways, and their day [daily routine] for taking care of house and husband and children is very long and hard.”43 Ishimoto’s point was that this kind of patience might be regarded by her American readers as negative, or weak and obedient, as it was typically used by foreigners to refer to Japanese women’s image. In her more complex perspective, Japanese women’s patience was not necessarily synonymous with their weakness within the roles of traditional womanhood or their lower status in society: While carrying the heavy yoke of labor, Japanese women have thus cultivated the power of endurance to a remarkable degree. Their negative strength has been developed amazingly. For instance, the women of my class never betray their agony at the movement of

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childbirth; nor do they use any sort of medicine to reduce the pain. At the moment of a great sorrow or a mental shock, they know how to control themselves and face the circumstances stoically. This is their great price of personal pride. This is our national pride in them.44 She could see that for the women themselves patience was their own everyday moral creed, and they saw it as an integral part of their traditional roles. In this sense it was a way for women to feel productive and creative and to negotiate with the dominant Japanese ideological cult of womanhood. In any case, the fruits of this kind of patience were that whether working within or outside the home, Japanese women contributed to society both economically and practically, by managing the household or by producing goods and services in the workplace. Ishimoto believed that although largely invisible, Japanese women had in fact traditionally participated in society while always pushing the boundaries to expand their sphere. In making connections between middle-class and working-class women, Ishimoto articulated women’s capacity for agency even within the strictures of Japanese culture. Perhaps this insight into women’s efforts led Ishimoto to find a solution when her husband pressured her back into a smaller sphere. Although she was frustrated, she did not give up her activities to promote birth control or withdraw into traditional gender roles. Instead, Ishimoto was determined to deal with both, aiming “to take care of my position within the family as wife and mother, and at the same time take an energetic part in public work.”45 In short, Ishimoto decided to pursue individuality by negotiating a role both within the traditional family structure and in wider society. Yet as Ishimoto pointed out, the political reality of women at the time “forces us to serve men as half-slaves.” This presented women with a formidable obstacle because, as she continued, “on every side our way to equal opportunity and independence is barred.” As it became increasingly clear that the problem rested at the juncture between woman and the state, she believed it was necessary to establish each woman’s individual sovereignty by creating women’s alliances across class differences. Ishimoto saw that a breakthrough in gender equality could only come through politics. The status quo that negated women’s individual freedom could not be changed without women’s equal representation in politics, since politics was controlled by middle-class men whose conservatism would naturally lead them to defend it. Only a breakthrough initiated by women themselves would lead to equal participation in society, and this could happen “only after the women of Japan shall have removed the fetters which cramp their thought and action.”46 This recognition led Ishimoto to promote the suffrage movement, demanding, “Cut

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the chains which bind the whole feminine population of Japan to the old feudal system!”47

Ishimoto Shidzue in America, 1924 In 1924, Ishimoto again traveled to the United States and Europe with Ishimoto Keikichi and her sister, in search of a model for the Japanese suffrage movement. During this trip, which one American newspaper called “an extensive survey of women’s suffrage in America,”48 Ishimoto met veteran suffrage leaders, including Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, and Harriet Stanton Blatch (1856–1940).49 These women told their vivid stories about their struggles and strategies in the battle for suffrage over the course of eighty years.50 Their accounts showed that women’s resolution and energy had been passed down unbroken since the nineteenth century. Behind their outstanding leadership and contribution to society, Ishimoto recognized a succession of persistent efforts by women to achieve gender equality. Identifying with these American women’s experience, Ishimoto pledged that “it would have to be repeated in Japan.”51 Moreover, her direct contact with American suffrage leaders provided important additional insights that helped in the making of Ishimoto’s feminist consciousness. These feminists showed a refreshingly prejudice-free attitude in their friendships with Ishimoto. She noted that “the sympathy of these American leaders strengthened my resolves [sic]. I thrilled at the idea of mutual respect and understanding overriding the barriers of distance and race.”52 This attitude indicated to her that women’s causes could escape the dynamics of male-dominated international political relations and racism. For Ishimoto, the cause of women’s equality seemed wide and inclusive enough to reach out to all, irrespective of geographical and cultural differences between the West and the East. Ishimoto was encouraged and inspired to “lead the women of Japan to their emancipation from outworn tradition.”53 She was not in the end fully accepted as a leader, at least until her election to the National Diet (Congress) in 1946. Japanese society was in general critical of her strong advocacy of women’s suffrage and birth control and she was seen pejoratively as a New Woman, being nicknamed “Madam Control” by some fellow members of the upper class.54 As she had expressed, this shared women’s cause highlighted the harsh political discord emerging in male-dominated international relations. Around the same time as Ishimoto’s visit to the United States in 1924, U.S.-Japanese relations were heading for trouble in the wake of the enactment of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (the Immigration Act of 1924).

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Ishimoto Keikichi predicted the general Japanese negative reaction against this law: “No matter what explanation is made, most Japanese, unfortunately, will regard it as an insult to their nation.”55 Ishimoto Shidzue was also critical, regretting that the issues of anti-Japanese agitation in California and the recent exclusion act were inevitably causes of heated debate and rancor. And she noted ruefully that “we want Americans to cooperate with us and we need them in our country. But not just to make money. I think women cooperate better than men.”56 For Ishimoto, discord over the immigration act seemed to show the characteristic manifestation of male-centered international politics based on a dichotomous West-versus-East view of the world. Ishimoto asserted that women knew how to solve the core of the issue, namely overpopulation. This was a significant argument internationally, as overpopulation in Japan was one of the great concerns for nations of the Pacific region and the wider world, being considered a threat to the security of the world’s food supply and future resources, as well as threatening to increase immigration.57 She argued that by exercising birth control, women contributed to world peace. The discourse of birth control was therefore a catalyst for facilitating communication and mutual understanding between American and Japanese middle-class women reformers at a time when it was much needed. Ishimoto wrote an essay in 1925 for the magazine published by the National Woman’s Party in the United States, Equal Rights. In it she said: [The] Feminist Movement, like everything else in Japan, because of the pressure of population on the small country and the limited natural resources, centers around the population problem. . . . As the great human problem of what to do with a surplus of children for whom there is not adequate means of support at home and no practical future abroad, the women of Japan will find the solution and make it effective.58 Ishimoto argued that birth control was both a domestic and a global issue, and that Japanese women, because of Japan’s increasing population, were in a unique position to make a contribution. The need to promote birth control was a shared understanding between Japanese and American women, and this international perspective on feminism convinced Ishimoto of women’s distinctive role in political life. Suffrage was the key to influence politics and politicize women’s perspectives. Upon completion of her travels, Ishimoto found that “I was ready once more for the battle at home.”59 Ishimoto was determined to take part in a second uphill struggle: to gain suffrage.

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Linking Birth Control with Suffrage Following her visits to the United States and the consequent development in her feminist consciousness, Ishimoto wrote, “I stepped out from the ivory tower from my institute to join the women’s suffrage campaign.”60 In practical terms, Ishimoto expanded her activism, from an approach focused only on the birth control movement to one engaged with the larger feminist movement. In the process, Ishimoto was determined to actively extend and discuss women’s rights issues along with other Japanese feminists. She joined in the newly formed Women’s Suffrage League (WSL; Fujin San­ seiken Kakutoku Kisei Dômeikai, renamed Fusen Kakutoku Dômei in 1925) and served as chair of the finance committee. Also, Ishimoto cofounded the Research Institute for Women’s Problems (Fujin Mondai Kenkyûsho) with suffragists, including Ichikawa Fusae and Kaneko (Yamataka) Shigeri (1899–1977) in 1925. The Research Institute’s platform was that “without restricting ourselves to any one school of thought, religious sect, or class, we pledge ourselves to study impartially the problems of women on a factual basis.”61 It clearly stated that the purpose of the women’s rights movement was to promote the interests of all women. Ishimoto supported this phase of the suffrage movement financially and emotionally by organizing a fund-raising group, the Bright Sunshine Society (Reijitsukai) with women artists and writers, including Hiratsuka Raichô and Yosano Akiko. This society was designed to expand the suffrage movement by including as many middle-class women as possible who were sympathizers yet were not likely to openly join in the suffrage campaigns because of their conservative family situation.62 For Ishimoto, not only as a suffragist but also as a birth control activist, to cooperate with the Women’s Suffrage League was important. As the WSL expanded its focus to include other women’s issues, Ishimoto was able to include and link birth control with other women’s issues. For example, she drafted a resolution for the Fifth National Women’s Suffrage Convention (Dai 5-kai Zen Nihon Fusen Taikai) in 1934. In this draft, she recommended to the convention that it should propose that the government establish public birth control clinics and revise the abortion provisions of the Criminal Code.63 The convention adopted Ishimoto’s proposal and passed a resolution (Sanji seigen no kônin to Dataizai kaisei no yôkyû) calling for “the approval of birth control and the revision of the Criminal Abortion Law.”64 In writing this resolution, Ishimoto and the others asserted that control of reproduction was women’s right. Specifically, they indicated that women had the right to have access to information and the means for birth

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control and that women had the right to choose conception or abortion on their own initiative. With this resolution, suffragists politicized reproduction issues and showed that woman herself was a moral and physical agent in the discourse of reproduction.65

Broadening Feminist Consciousness In part, what was behind these feminists’ call for reproductive rights was the increasing sociopolitical pressure for large families under the heightening influence of nationalism and militarism in Japan after the Manchurian Incident in 1931. Nevertheless, in spite of this explicit pressure for large families, women’s magazines and newspapers carried commercial advertisements for birth control clinics and methods. It was apparent that the individual’s desire to control reproduction worked differently from the government’s logic. It is hard to grasp the exact number of women who practiced birth control. But for example, in 1929, the Tokyo municipal government made public that it would take measures to encourage birth control among poor large families.66 This indicates that birth control was officially approved in some cases, even though the government was pressing for large families in general. Women’s magazines, such as Shufu No Tomo (Housewife’s Companion), Fujin Sekai (Women’s World ), and Fujin Gahô (Illustrated Women’s Gazette) gave information about methods and means of birth control to women readers, who had a pressing need for the information. Readers’ success stories about the practice of birth control and advertisements about of birth control products were published.67 Even in 1935, Tsûzoku Igaku (Popular Medicine) advertised “a total of thirty-six different products for contraception” and the prevention of infection with venereal disease, so there is evidence that change was occurring.68 In fact, as the notion of birth control became popular among the masses, Ishimoto observed that “women do not mind talking about sexuality and birth control nowadays. This indicates that birth control has become a common practice.”69 For it to be popular, easy access to information was necessary and birth control methods needed to be cheap and safe. At the juncture of woman and the state, a gender alliance that overcame class differences was necessary in order to achieve woman’s individual sovereignty. To deal with these problems, Ishimoto and other women birth control advocates—including Hiratsuka Raichô, Kawasaki Natsu, Niizuma Ito, and a physician, Yamamoto Sugi—formed the Japanese Women’s League for Birth Control (Nihon Sanjichôsetsu Fujin Dômei) in 1933 and established birth control clinics in 1934 and 1937.70 The foundation of the league

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showed that Ishimoto felt that a different perspective from that of men was needed to advance the birth control movement. In particular, she differentiated her theory and methods of birth control from those of other organizations run by prominent male birth control advocates, including Dr. Majima Yutaka and Abe Isoo.71 Unlike her male counterparts, Ishimoto criticized abortion as an alternative means for birth control and explained the antiabortion policy of her clinic: “The public expect to abort babies at a birth control clinic” but “since birth control is a preventive measure for [avoiding] bearing babies, we turn down clients if they are pregnant.” 72 Legitimacy was lent to Ishimoto’s movement by the application of the methods and knowledge she had learned while training in Sanger’s clinic in New York in 1933, where a precedent had also been set for this position on abortion.73 Ishimoto therefore designed her clinics so that her clients would avoid abortion. For example, Ishimoto advertised her application of Americanstyle, effective methods. These were preventive, which theoretically meant that women would not need to abort babies.74 Practically speaking, Ishimoto provided two services to her clients. First, as a means of birth control, she prepared made-to-order diaphragms, along with her own line of contraceptive jelly, which she made following a recipe of Sanger’s. Second, as part of a counseling service, Yamamoto Sugi gave advice on the usage of contraceptives to clients, and Ishimoto recorded the clients’ histories.75 Ishimoto was thus able to encourage clients to achieve sustained family planning by spacing out childbearing. The women were able to control their bodies and sexuality free from the fear of unwanted pregnancy. All these efforts indicate that Ishimoto promoted birth control suffused with feminist consciousness. The opinion of some middle-class women about Japan’s increasing militarization diverged from that of the government, and international contacts only made this clearer. In particular, Ishimoto focused on the gap between Japanese women’s views and those of the government through the birth control lens and used it to promote women’s international connections. At the 1933 International Congress of Women in Chicago, Ishimoto criticized Japan’s population policy. She said, “In preaching the gospel of sex-self determination [sexual autonomy], I have seen how hard the life of women of my country is. They have not had personal liberty. They lived in economic and sexual bondage.”76 Ishimoto was of course referring to Japanese women’s struggle for control over their bodies and sexuality, but she was also indicating that women’s interests conflicted with the national interest. For her, women’s autonomy regarding their bodies and sexuality was a core issue in women’s liberation regardless of nationality.

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In the same fashion, in the international arena, the birth control issue magnified Japanese women’s desire for peace at a time when Japan’s militarization and overpopulation posed a considerable threat to world peace.77 As Sabine Frühstück writes, “Most birth control advocates in Japan, who were commonly associated with various farm and labor unions, agreed that the country’s rapid population growth harbored many dangers for social and international peace.”78 Using the discourse of birth control, Ishimoto emphasized that Japanese women did not support Japan’s militaristic actions or the government’s policies. As she told a reporter from Ohio’s Lima News in 1937: The articulate woman is still frowned upon by the government. But the [Japanese] women themselves are at least finding broader horizons. They are greatly interested in [the] work and crusades not only of Mrs. Roosevelt but of Margaret Sanger and they are convinced of the necessity of raising [the] standard of living by limiting the number of children in any family. . . . We want peace, and we want lives free from the terror of impending struggle.79 It would be an overstatement to claim that Ishimoto represented all Japanese women’s voices. As we see with peace-minded Japanese women in Chapter 3 and with the suffragists who struggled to achieve peace and equality in Japanese society in Chapter 5, a number of women reformers and sympathizers demonstrated their concern for peace. But Ishimoto precisely illustrates how some middle- and upper-class Japanese women identified themselves with American social activists for social justice rather than with the Japanese state. More importantly, Ishimoto suggested that through birth control Japanese women could refuse to acquiesce to the government’s aggressive policies—there would be fewer sons for the army. Although obviously unenfranchised, Japanese women could seize the initiative in reproduction. For Ishimoto, birth control was a political choice for Japanese women. At the same time as identifying closely with the ideology of the international women’s cause, Ishimoto also tried to prove that Japan itself was not a warlike state. Ishimoto’s efforts to facilitate birth control as a means to achieve mutual, international understanding among women could also be understood as a political decision motivated by her national feeling. That is, as Japan came to be regarded as “an outsider” in the international community in the wake of its ultramilitarization, Ishimoto wanted to secure a space that Japan could use to participate in the international community. In this sense, to indicate that Japanese women had their own perspective independent of the government’s policies was important.

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Ishimoto’s internationalist feminist perspective was underlined in her speech at the International Congress of Women in Chicago in 1933. Un­ fortunately, the details of her actual speech are not known, but afterward, referring to her experience of friendship with American women reformers in a short news article, she stated, “The distance between East and West is not so great as it used to be.”80 The central theme of the congress was “Our Common Cause, Civilization,” and speakers discussed women’s responsibilities to create a better society and the world, suggesting that Ishimoto did as well.81 Under the increasing influence of nationalism and militarism in the late 1930s, the Japanese government began to directly regulate the birth control movement. For example, in 1935, the government restricted the ability of doctors to promote contraception.82 Ishimoto was arrested and detained in a local police office between December 15 and December 29 in 1937. She was not arrested for her support for birth control but was questioned about her association with labor movement leaders, including Katô Kanjû, whom she went on to marry in 1944 after gaining permission from the Department of the Imperial Household to divorce Ishimoto Keikichi.83 Although Ishimoto’s arrest was based on the suspicion that she was a part of “violation of the peace preservation law [Chian Iji Hô of 1925] by sympathizers with the rising labor movement,”84 Ishimoto was nevertheless prohibited in January 1938 from the unrelated activity of promoting the birth control movement. Despite this, even though restricted, Ishimoto managed to secretly continue contributing to the birth control movement by providing women with contraception on request.85 This incident indicated that women’s reproduction and work were increasingly becoming the objects of government control as the Japanese state strengthened its totalitarian grip on society. Further repressive laws were enforced. The General Mobilization Law (Kokka Sôdôin Hô) of 1938 harnessed every aspect of society and the economy toward the war effort, controlling labor unions and the media. The National Eugenics Law (Kokumin Yûsei Hô) in 1940 targeted the control of women’s reproduction; it allowed for both voluntary and involuntary sterilizations in cases such as hereditary mental illness or deficiency, severe and malignant hereditary personality disorder or physical ailment, and severe hereditary deformity (Article 3). In the case of abortion, doctors had to get a second opinion before performing one and submit a report to the administrative office beforehand.86 By this law, the government aimed to create a bigger population that was in “good health.” To this end, in a January 1941 cabinet meeting, the government outlined its population-growth policies, which stipulated the

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suppression of birth control measures, including contraception and abortion.87 Through these laws and policies, the government made the birth control movement de facto illegal and exercised further control over women’s bodies and lives. In assessing Ishimoto’s contribution to advancing women’s reproductive rights in the period before World War II, it is important to recognize the considerable difficulties that existed in her era. Even in the 1920s, although the birth control movement was not illegal in Japan, the Japanese patriarchal family structure exerted strong pressures on women, and an anti–birth control policy was sociopolitically and economically enforced. Furthermore, as Japanese women did not have suffrage at this time, they lacked the power and position needed to promote policies that would give women more control over their lives. The Japanese sociopolitical reality of the time led Ishimoto to shape her movement in a way that would function realistically in society. This in turn led her ideas to become increasingly comprehensive, broadening beyond birth control to include suffrage and covering women’s rights across class and national lines. It would be fair to say that this expanded attitude as a social reformer spurred her on to become one of the thirty-nine women legislators first elected to the National Diet (Congress) in 1946. Ishimoto was ahead of her time. At a time when reproduction was effectively compulsory for most Japanese women and public debate about it was discouraged, Ishimoto linked the personal body with national and international issues. She sought ways to make bridges between the working class and the middle class, between traditional and modern cultures and the East and the West. She risked arrest by criticizing policies and attitudes that objectified women. Some in the American press called Ishimoto the “interpreter of Japanese women.”88 At the same time, she was an interpreter of American women to Japanese women. She tried to disseminate the ideas of individual rights and autonomy for Japanese women by applying the American birth control discourse. Discourses of feminism in the early twentieth century were centered on core interlinked issues, including control of women’s sexuality, political rights, and international peace; Ishimoto identified that these issues were the keys to the emergence of women’s rights in Japan. In doing so, she created an ideological common ground, which facilitated communication between American and Japanese women, based on her recognition that women had shared interests beyond socially created differences.

5

Using Their Initiative at Home and Beyond Suffragists’ Wartime Activism, 1931–1941 I thought that we Japanese women became not only women of Japan but also women of the world. Regarding this evolution, I have an earnest request to Japanese women. That is, we have to recognize that we are “women of the world” and we have to have firm faith accompanying this recognition. Hayashi Uta, “Kôkaijô: Gunshukukaigi kara kaette” [Open Letter: Coming Back from the Disarmament Congress]

It is our earnest desire to have our co-workers abroad recognize and be acquainted with the work, insignificant perhaps but nevertheless assiduous effort, of the Japanese women. We sincerely hope that the day may soon come when we too may be more fully equipped to work not only for the welfare of the nation but for the world and the humanity at large to which one-half of the human race [women] belongs. Ichikawa Fusae,1 “An Introductory Note”

J

apanese feminists were gaining confidence in their role in the international suffrage and feminist movements by the beginning of the 1930s; however, international political developments struck a hard blow against the suffrage movement. In the period following the Manchurian Incident in September 1931, Japan emerged as a totalitarian, militaristic state.2 The incident was followed by a further invasion of the Chinese mainland and military takeover of northeastern China, which eventually led to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Faced with mounting criticism from abroad, the Japanese government gave up on international cooperation, Parts of this chapter were previously published in Taeko Shibahara, “‘Not Only for the Welfare of the Nation but for the World and Humanity’: The Interwar Suffrage Movement in Japan,” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 62–68. Copyright © 2012 Journal of Women’s History. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.

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withdrawing from the League of Nations in 1933. Domestically, following the collapse of the Minseitô party’s Wakatsuki Reijirô (1866–1949) cabinet in December 1931 and the assassination of the next prime minister (Inukai Tsuyoshi of the Seiyûkai party) by young naval officials in May 1932, government through political parties was severely limited and replaced by oligarchic nonparty cabinets, which were eventually controlled by the military.3 A retired admiral, Saitô Makoto (1858–1936), was asked to form a “national unity” cabinet by Saionji Kinmochi (1849–1940), one of the Meiji leaders. At this time of national crisis, most people appear to have supported the formation of the Saitô cabinet rather than a parliamentary democracy. The enthusiasm or otherwise of the population for given policies in this period is difficult to gauge accurately. Civilians had not been involved in the decisionmaking process that led to the militarization of Japan despite elections, since the Meiji Constitution gave supreme command to the emperor, who was expected to give legitimacy to reports from advisors, including army and navy chiefs. In addition, military men had significant influence in forming or disbanding government cabinets. For example, among forty-three cabinets headed by thirty prime ministers between 1885 and 1945, half of the prime ministers were military figures, and between 1930 and 1945, from fourteen cabinets, eight prime ministers were military men.4 In addition, press censorship limited people’s free access to information. Yet Gilbert Bowles (1869–1960), who came to Tokyo as a Quaker missionary in 1901 and lived there for forty years, reported in 1932 that some Japanese publicists who had constructive criticism to offer found that “it is not Press Censorship but the intense national spirit of the people which prevents critical publicity.”5 People appeared to have experienced a strong tide of what Raymond Williams called “nationalist feeling”6 after the Manchurian Incident. Such a reactionary attitude reversed earlier gains made toward women’s rights. Before the Manchurian Incident, in 1931 the Lower House had passed a limited extension of a women’s franchise bill introduced by the Hamaguchi Osachi (1870–1931) government, and people had expected that women’s political participation in voting for the local government would be achieved in 1932.7 As heightening nationalism and militarism came to hold sway, voices arguing for rights for women as individuals were silenced. The government led by Saitô refused to support woman suffrage because of his belief that it was too early to give women civil rights.8 In the discourse of the era’s gender ideology, women’s collective duty to the nation as labor and as childbearers took precedence over rights they might have hoped for as individual citizens.

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Consequently, after the sixty-ninth session of the National Diet in 1936 (by which time political parties had little power beyond supporting imperialism in any case), major conservative parties gave up introducing suffrage bills, which had sought to establish participation in national and local politics as well as granting women the right to join a political party. Looking back in 1939, Ichikawa Fusae noted, “The Manchurian Incident marked the end of parliamentary government, and that dealt a heavy blow to our camp [the suffrage movement].”9 Despite its desire to restrict women from participating in politics, at the same time, the government planned to mobilize women for the nation’s “common cause” through public works. For example, it encouraged women to participate in its civil measures, including the promotion of “thrift and savings” and a “clean vote” (senkyo shukusei) campaign. Undoubtedly, the government was more eager to develop mechanisms for national mobilization than to open up opportunities for women’s participation in politics.10 To mobilize its women effectively, the government led them to organize new women’s groups or reorganize existing ones. These included the Greater Japan Federation of Women’s Associations (Dai Nihon Rengô Fujinkai), founded in 1930 as a Ministry of Education initiative, and the National Defense Women’s Association (Dai Nihon Kokubô Fujinkai), which was founded in 1932 and was controlled by the Army Ministry. In the same year the Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujinkai) was revitalized by the Home Ministry.11 Through these government-sponsored organizations, the government planned to use women for nationalistic and militaristic purposes.12 Such measures presented WSL members with a stark choice: accepting government roles but giving up the suffrage and women’s rights movement in order to support “national unity,” or rejecting them, knowing that continued unofficial suffrage and women’s rights activism would be futile. Few Japanese women could avoid this pervasive sociopolitical climate. Nevertheless, to sidestep the government’s control, and moreover, to influence the government’s plans, WSL women chose to take the initiative in improving the lives of ordinary citizens. It was in this context that these middle-class Japanese feminists shifted the priorities of the women’s rights movement from political rights to social rights, such as welfare support and health services. In making this change, WSL members formed alliances with other women’s groups. At the same time, the WSL desired to maintain international ties. To exchange information with women’s organizations overseas, in 1935 the WSL began publishing Japanese Women News, and a bimonthly journal in English,

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Japanese Women, began in 1938. WSL women wanted to fill the knowledge gaps that existed between women in Japan and Anglophone cultures. Yet many were frustrated that because of cultural and linguistic differences, the bilateral relationship meant that Japanese women received information more often than giving it. Moreover, they were concerned that Japan’s rising militarism placed them at odds with other women because international feminist organizations were greatly critical of imperialism and militarism, regardless of their own national interests. Determined to overcome Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world, WSL women sought to publicize information about nonmilitaristic aspects of Japan by describing the daily life of ordinary citizens, Japanese women’s history, and details of their current social activism. In this way, the WSL planned to continue pursuing its ideals within the women’s rights movement nationally and internationally. Suffragists, represented by the WSL, recognized that they had multiple moral duties: to themselves, the family, the state, and the international community. This recognition of duties toward society led the women not simply to grudgingly accept the government’s demands but rather to voluntarily seize the initiative. “Collaboration by our own choice” was how WSL members like Ichikawa described their political activism.13 For Ichikawa, “no movement can avoid the influence of [current] social conditions. We need a particular ‘tactic’ [to promote the suffrage movement]. . . . Even if we do not gain suffrage legally, we plan to exercise a de facto political power.”14 By this she meant to exert influence from within wherever possible, and to demonstrate the capacity to sustain responsible roles. Faced with a choice of assuming roles in public life on their own initiative, or silence under the militarists’ demands for “national unity,” these suffragists acted to maintain a productive orientation to political power. In negotiating this choice, they were determined to participate in national politics at least in some way by taking advantage of the government’s plans to encourage them to work in the public sphere, if that was all that was possible within the Japanese sociopolitical framework of the period. At the same time, WSL suffragists tried to maintain some international connections through international women’s channels. Feminism in 1930s Japan highlighted the intricate and difficult balance between internationalist feminism and national interests.

The Women’s Rights Movement in the Aftermath of the Manchurian Incident The Manchurian Incident clearly indicated that Japan was moving toward becoming an ultramilitaristic state. After successful propaganda, the public

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largely accepted the government’s justification for war against China, which led Japan toward further militarization and eventually to entering World War II. Observing Japan’s changing political climate, the American missionary Gilbert Bowles noted in 1932: Ever since the outbreak of the Manchurian disturbance on September 18th last I have been aware that Japan’s policy was revealing a new situation within a nation. . . . I was conscious that this was not the Japan which I knew up to July 2, 1930. . . . [O]ne discovers almost no public criticism of Japan’s recent Manchurian policy. . . . Criticism publicly expressed has been met with threats and obstructions.15 As Bowles indicated, with Japan in the midst of unprecedented militarization, the public, who had limited access to alternative views because of press censorship, in general accepted the government’s explanation about the cause of the incident and that it was “for the sake of self-defense.”16 Many embraced extreme forms of jingoism. Under increasing militarism, Japanese feminists began to explore how they should commit themselves or how they could find their space in the narrowing climate of nationalism. The ways that feminists responded to the incident were varied. Conservative women’s groups, including the Patriotic Women’s Association, actively supported the government’s cause by sending gifts and arranging for personnel to entertain the troops in Manchuria.17 Yoshioka Yayoi reflected the views of other conservative suffragists when she wrote, “Woman in general abhors warfare because she is the symbol of peace,” while nevertheless insisting that “the whole nation should give solid support to the government’s war policy during this unavoidable emergency.”18 It followed that they thought it best to shelve women’s suffrage for the time being. This prioritizing of the war effort over women’s issues by some feminists is a process that also played out in other countries around the world, including Britain and with Carrie Chapman Catt in America. For many other feminists, however, their reaction to the incident was an increased desire for peace. For some Japanese feminists, like their Western sisters, the link between peace and equality was obvious: they were inseparable and either they could both be pursued or neither could be advanced. In many cases, however, feminists wavered between supporting their nation in war and committing to the larger international cause for peace, because they identified themselves with both their national and international gender communities. The famous pacifist Wada (Kôra) Tomi, for example, expected Japanese women to support peace and yet to make Japan’s situation

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clear to a skeptical international audience. “Japanese women have responsibility in creating justice and peace,” she explained, “as well as promoting international understanding about Japan’s situation.”19 As for the attitude of the Women’s Peace Association in Japan (WPAJ), Ichikawa Fusae claimed that “the WPAJ tries to strike a balance between pro-nationalism and prointernationalism.”20 The WPAJ did not make strong, official objection to Japan’s military actions, instead obliquely emphasizing “Japan’s authentic international spirit” in its communiqué to members of the WPAJ and their acquaintances.21 This wording probably reflects the WPAJ’s strategy, discussed in Chapter 3, of promoting the less political cause of international goodwill and friendship. In the same communiqué, however, the WPAJ clearly stated its commitment to peace, saying, “We are willing to provide support for a peace settlement.”22 The relative passivity of these peace-minded women’s criticism of the government was in some ways a symptom of the lack of political rights among Japanese women. In a highly militarized climate, without political rights their voice for peace carried no authority and thus was accorded no recognition. The problem was, as WPAJ women lamented, that “Japanese women are still deprived of any political privileges, and naturally are left entirely helpless.”23 As a result, active suffragists such as Ichikawa Fusae were made even more painfully aware of the links between women’s political participation and the issues of war and peace. Although she expressed regret at the Manchurian Incident, Ichikawa, in order “not to provoke the army and fascists,” avoided the use of harsh critical terms.24 Instead, she emphasized the promotion of peace via women’s suffrage. “[The achievement of] suffrage itself is not our [WSL’s] purpose, but the usage of political power that arises from suffrage is the way to reach our purpose [peace].”25 For Ichikawa, women were universally “mothers of human beings” who naturally sought peace.26 However, if women only felt this desire for peace but did not take action, nothing could be realized, since all political decisions bypassed woman’s participation. Therefore Ichikawa believed that in the midst of jingoistic culture, women had an even greater need to be empowered to promote peace. She dared in 1931 to call for universal suffrage and for women to be able to vote in national elections, rather than just in local elections as had been put forward in recently proposed suffrage bills, as access to the national government was essential to give power to women’s will for peace.27 Accordingly, in the autumn of 1931, as the threat of war was unfolding, the scope of women’s responsibilities in society took on an increasing urgency: the life or death of human beings.

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In part, to advance such reform in society, acting on their own initiatives was an important strategy for these feminists. Because there were conflicts between women’s interests and the state’s, to pursue issues of importance to feminists, they needed to be independent of government control, all the more so in the society that was lurching toward totalitarianism. For example, according to Kaneko (Yamataka) Shigeri (1899–1977), the leading member of the WSL, “the government cleverly utilized almost all women’s organizations in Japan and planned to exert its will by bypassing women’s will.”28 Kaneko was cautious of the potential limitations of such women’s organizations, including the Patriotic Women’s Association, the National Defense Women’s Association, and the Greater Japan Federation of Women’s Associations. She saw the danger that under government patronage, women’s organizations could come to serve as a local agency of the government instead of promoting women’s interests. This meant that the government could manipulate and exploit the women’s desire to participate in society for its own ends. Consequently, there was a growing awareness among suffragists about remaining autonomous and independent of the government. For Kaneko, “independence was a matter of pride for whomever was involved in the women’s rights movement.”29 In this way, these feminists cherished independence and acts of voluntary will to promote the women’s rights movement. Building on this recognition, the WSL and three other suffrage groups, including the Proletarian Women’s Alliance (Musan Fujin Dômei), formed the Joint Committee of Women’s Suffrage Groups (Fusen Dantai Rengô Iinkai) in 1932 to enhance the women’s suffrage movement. The committee was an amalgam of middle- and working-class suffrage groups. The formation of a cross-class committee indicated that there was a determination to carry out suffrage campaigns inclusively and effectively even in this reactionary period. To express their will to promote the suffrage movement across barriers, the committee issued a communiqué to a number of varied political parties, saying, “Because we are women, we have again been left out of politics and made to be political dependents. . . . The domestic and international situations are getting worse; this is a common concern [for both men and women] and thus we need to cooperate in achieving a breakthrough. For this reason we regard woman’s suffrage as all the more necessary.”30 The dynamism of these peace-minded suffragists in their efforts to enter onto the political stage was essentially motivated by their desire to establish a different political culture from that of men. They wanted peace based on political as well as social equality, and their struggle achieved fuller expression

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in the Third National Women’s Suffrage Convention in 1932. The women there unanimously adopted antifascism as well as the promotion of an aggressive suffrage campaign. Another resolution stipulated the meaning of the woman’s vote, showing awareness that the absence of parties representing their views meant that achieving the vote in itself would not be enough: “[After suffrage] the woman’s vote should not be exploited by existing parties. Woman should use her vote to formulate a new political culture that would promote the welfare of the majority of the people.”31 However, Japanese women continued to be denied access to the policymaking process. The government imposed restrictions on liberalism after the Manchurian Incident, and the government did not support even voting in local elections for women.32 The government had silenced socialist women using arrest and imprisonment. It also put liberal feminists under surveillance.33 Although the WSL continued to demand suffrage, WSL women such as Ichikawa recognized in 1933 that they had no choice but to confess that they regarded women’s suffrage as unattainable in an ever more serious national emergency.34 They made a strategic choice at this time to turn the focus of the movement to community-based activism instead, using the ideas and practices that Ichikawa had acquired during her visit to the Chicago Women’s Club. Activities included fighting against monopolies in wholesale markets, campaigning for anticorruption measures during elections, and pushing for better waste disposal in Tokyo.35 To drive out corruption in the Tokyo municipal government, suffragists helped women in Tokyo to organize the Woman’s Alliance for the Imperial City Administration (also translated at the time as the Women’s Association for the Municipal Betterment of Tokyo; Tokyo Fujin Shisei Jôka Renmei) in 1933.36 This alliance also led a drive to clean up Tokyo and initiated campaigns to reduce garbage and separate out whatever could be useful.37 Of course, the ultimate goal of assuming such public roles was suffrage. Suffragists linked civic work with woman suffrage because it demonstrated women’s readiness for voting by displaying their capacity to solve social problems closely related to everyday life. However, assuming such public roles was double-edged. To have suffragists’ views reflected in the decisions of the majority of women and the administration, it was vital to promote strategic cooperation with as many groups as possible, including groups under the government’s control. However, such “strategic cooperation” entailed the risk of being subjected to administrative control. For example, even the suffragists’ “fair election” voluntary campaign beginning in 1928 was merged into the government’s campaign to enforce discipline in general elections in 1935 (Senkyo shukusei

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undô).38 Thus, what had started out as the WSL women’s strategic decision to focus on social problems in 1933, by 1935 came to be regarded by the government as an opportunity for co-option.39 Nevertheless, while the independence of suffragists became compromised, their grassroots political activism did help them to further develop feminist consciousness. At the Fifth National Women’s Suffrage Convention in 1934, in addition to asking for the immediate granting of the vote, suffragists made resolutions with thirteen clauses asking for the enactment of laws to protect working women and to support mothers and children in need, the authorization of birth control, the lifting of laws restricting licensed prostitutes, the revision of the abortion law and the civil code, and the ability to aid the dissemination of pro-peace and antiwar ideas among people and to develop a plan to facilitate an international women’s alliance for peace.40 In adopting these proposals, suffragists fully and clearly indicated that in many areas the state’s interests were in conflict with those of women. Suffragists needed more public support, and even though they were increasingly active and vocal, they were still a small minority of the population.41 In Ichikawa’s estimate, “a decade after the inception of the WSL [in 1924], we gained ten branches with two thousand members [in total]. The membership only increased ten times in size [from an original number of 200 to 2,000 members], although the concept of woman suffrage had become socially acceptable.”42 To increase participation and support, convincing evidence that advertised the benefits of women’s empowerment was necessary. That is, by demonstrating women’s capacity to solve the social problems of everyday life, Japanese suffragists aimed to recruit members of the general public by showing them the link between women’s empowerment and an improved civic life.43 Although these resolutions were adopted in 1934, how could feminists find a meaningful space in which there was a realistic chance to effect change in Japanese women’s rights in the era? It seemed certain that the only issue that could unite all women—and was definitely feasible—was that of support for mothers and children. It would be a trade-off: the government, although antagonistic to women’s rights, could see it as a gain for everyone because it wanted children to be healthy enough to become workers and soldiers; it would understand the propaganda value of supporting war widows; and giving financial support might lend an attractive sense of legitimacy to its control over women. But in return, at least women and children in desperate poverty could gain support from the government, and for this reason achieving support legislation was seen as a crucial step toward women’s rights.

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Thus in the same year the WSL formed the Alliance for the Promotion of a Mother and Child Protection Act (Boshi Hogo Hô Seitei Sokushin Fujin Renmei) with twenty other women’s organizations, including the Social Masses Women’s League (Shakai Taishû Fujin Dômei) and individual women. The alliance lobbied the National Diet to pass a law that would protect mothers’ rights, including the right to maintain a minimum standard of living, and would set up a compensatory benefit for bereaved wives and mothers of soldiers. The alliance increased its affiliated organizations to twenty-four in 1936, and it eventually led to the enactment of the Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need (Boshi Hogo Hô) in 1937, which aimed to protect mothers in need with children under thirteen.44 In opposition to prevailing perceptions that the poverty of women was their own individual and moral problem, the WSL women politicized this issue as a fundamental women’s rights issue that linked personal and social spheres, asserting women’s individual right to a certain standard of living, as the 1934 resolution indicated. The movement was galvanized by an increasing number of suicides and infanticides by single, widowed, and divorced mothers. The immediate concern was obviously to provide shelter and relief for poor mothers with children, but the feminists’ theoretical analysis was also important. This addressed the fundamental problems of poor women, institutionally disadvantaged by the social structure, including the modern family system, laws, and social code. Poor women were effectively invisible and dismissed by modern patriarchal institutions that provided little in the way of a safety net.45 The campaign was rooted in a feminist consciousness that addressed women’s oppressed condition and aimed to create better lives. In making these connections, suffragists claimed leadership. In Fusen in August 1934 it was asserted, “Fundamentally, the movement was initiated neither by social work organizations nor general women’s organizations, but by the Joint Committee of Women’s Suffrage Groups.”46 Political awareness was clear in their strategies. To deal with problems facing mothers with children, the suffragists requested the government to institute broader reform beyond merely providing poor mothers with relief. These requests for reform, for instance, included the right to demand childcare expenses from divorced fathers; the right to abortion in specific cases; the setting up of a family arbitration court to settle family disputes over compensatory benefits for the bereaved families of soldiers; and the setting up of welfare facilities for mothers and children. Based on this broad agenda, the movement was known as “the Motherhood Protection Movement.”47 For these feminists, the lack of political rights still represented a significant obstacle to women demanding social rights from the state. In fact, the

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original broader ideas for the law were not met. The law was passed as “the Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need,” but some feminists were unsatisfied with the way the law narrowly defined its beneficiaries: “mothers [including grandmothers] who have children of thirteen years of age or under in their care, but are unable to carry on living because of poverty.”48 This at least meant that, unlike similar legislation in the United States, the law would cover mothers with illegitimate children. However, the budget allocated to help recipients was small, and children over the cutoff age of thirteen were still too young to help support the family financially. Further, recipients were monitored and watched by officials, as the law stipulated that recipients must not exhibit “deplorable behavior for fear of exerting harmful influence over their children’s education.”49 This stipulation meant that women who were eligible to receive government assistance were denied it if their personal behavior was judged immoral or if they committed a crime.50 Thus, the authorities were legally empowered to judge women’s behavior, including their sexuality. The socialist feminist Yamakawa Kikue, while dissatisfied with the flaws in the law, nevertheless judged that it was “better than nothing.”51 The view of Kawasaki Natsu, a birth control advocate and educator, was that “if mothers’ behaviors are counted as criteria when applying the Law, the spirit of the Law is broken.”52 Overall, this law targeted women who were regarded as dependent, and this in turn further extended the state’s control over women. In this sense, unlike suffrage, protective legislation for women would not lead to their empowerment or full citizenship, as argued by the historian Barbara Molony.53 Suffragists who promoted the movement understood this all too well at the time, one saying with weary irony in 1934, “Even fascists would raise no objections to protecting mothers and children.”54 Nevertheless, for Japanese feminists, the enactment of the law was not only “the most significant accomplishment” but also a useful test run for the feminist movement.55 They knew beforehand from Western women’s example that there were connections between woman’s suffrage and protective legislation for mothers and children.56 Further, as a WSL member wrote, experience of negotiation and lobbying “taught women the right and efficient way of attacking the houses of the Japanese Parliament.”57 In these challenges women saw a great opportunity to unify the women’s movement, which they hoped would allow them to break through and achieve suffrage. Thus, from a rights perspective, success in achieving the principle of the right to protective legislation indicated, it was hoped, future success in achieving suffrage as a women’s right. In Ichikawa’s view, “If we achieved this [Protection Law], the suffrage movement is half complete.”58

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Women’s Initiative in Wartime Social Activism during the Second Sino-Japanese War In July 1937 the WSL women recognized that Japan’s all-out war against China was unavoidable, and they were determined to extend their cooperation with other groups and to take the initiative in further public roles. To facilitate this, they joined in creating an independent core organization, the Federation of Japanese Women’s Organizations (FJWO; Nihon Fujin Dantai Renmei)—also translated at the time as the League of Japanese W ­ omen’s Organizations—along with seven other independent groups including Christian, suffrage, peace, and consumer organizations. It was established in September 1937, and Gauntlett Tsune was appointed president.59 The question for FJWO women as posed in the WSL journal was “what should we do as women on the home front, apart from performing tasks that are already popular with women, such as sewing protective charms for soldiers like ‘thousand-stitch belts’ (sen-nin bari) [with stitches by a thousand different women], giving a send off to soldiers leaving for the front, and making gift bags [of comforts] (imon bukuro) for soldiers at the front?”60 Members of the FJWO made it clear that they would not be engaged in the same wartime activities as those promoted by the government-sponsored women’s groups, which included seeing off soldiers and raising money for the war effort, but instead would pursue two goals: helping to maintain a viable minimum standard of living during the national crisis and preparing for the reconstruction work that would be needed at the end of the war. For the members of the FJWO, it was necessary to frame wartime activities, which they found distasteful, as a part of the women’s rights movement rather than a goal in itself, aiming, as Ishimoto Shidzue put it, “to take a constructive step” toward escaping roles enforced by men.61 To promote specific, concrete activities, the FJWO formed seven committees, for the spiritual mobilization of the nation, women and labor, economy and consumption, better living conditions, child welfare, social work, and health and hygiene.62 Working through these committees, the FJWO developed campaigns, including encouraging the eating of whole-meal rice for health, protesting the removal of the law that prohibited employers from hiring women miners to work underground, others regarding hygiene, and consumer campaigns.63 Through these initiatives the FJWO hoped to maintain some independence from government influence, as government-sponsored women’s groups were firmly tied to the government’s wartime campaign, called “the mobilization of the national spirit (kokumin seishin sôdôin),” which organized the

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population in support of the Second Sino-Japanese war. By today’s standards it may be difficult to see in what way the federation was independent of government influence. But from their own perspective, FJWO members’ activism was differentiated from that of “official” groups of women in that they thought that by cooperating with the state on certain specific wartime programs, they would be better able to do other activities on their own initiative. Thus, they pledged to cooperate with the government by hosting a Women’s National Emergency Congress (Jikyoku Fujintaikai; translated at the time as the Women’s Conference on Current Problems) in March 1938.64 At the congress, the suffragists joined with other delegates to call on Japanese women to “arise for the spiritual mobilization, for there will be no constructive work without [the] cooperation of women.”65 Members of the League of Japanese Women’s Organizations, including Ichikawa and Kaneko, also combined with government-sponsored women’s organizations to hold a mass women’s meeting in Tokyo in December 1939, at which 1,500 attendees pledged to cooperate with the wartime national economy. To this end, austerity resolutions were adopted calling for the abolition of the custom of exchanging gifts and holding year-end and new-year parties, and encouraging savings.66 This meeting certainly had a nationalist purpose. However, such cooperation also had a strategic importance because, as Ichikawa explained in 1940, the suffragists hoped that “the management and control of these [government-controlled] societies and associations may be handed over to women themselves.”67 They understood the hegemonic power of nationalism; nevertheless, they wanted to promote the women’s rights movement inside this limited space. Ichikawa noted that gaining control over social activism by women “is extremely difficult, and yet we cannot help hoping that it is not altogether impossible.”68 In due course, through promoting wartime social activism, WSL women like Ichikawa did gain positions in government-sponsored committees, including the Network Committee of the Central League for the National Spiritual Mobilization (Kokumin Seishin Sôdôin Iinkai).69 Suffragists also became members of several other committees appointed by the government.70 For WSL women, to be accorded such “official” status was strategically important. They had learned from their struggles since the 1920s that the government would not agree to answer women’s issues unless women gained official positions.71 Since the number of women in these committees was small, it is perhaps overstating the case to assert that they changed the government’s policies. Moreover, Gauntlett, president of the FJWO, recognized that women’s participation in national work did not mean that they were legally entitled to official positions as a woman’s right.72 Nevertheless, to take

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part in the home front battle afforded a chance to include women’s perspective when carrying out their assigned national roles, and this provided a rare space to promote the women’s rights movement in the late 1930s. Their plan was to push the government to apply practical measures that would protect or improve the lives of Japanese women and support family life during this critical period.73 In fact, some feminists such as the socialist Yamakawa Kikue refused to cooperate with government-promoted wartime activities. Yamakawa instead chose to withdraw from public life until the end of World War II.74 Other socialist women chose either to give up their public activity or to limit themselves to moderate reform issues.75 In adopting a strategy of cooperation with government as a way of entering the official arena, middle-class Japanese suffragists received impetus from Western role models from World War I. For example, Ôtsuki Terue (1904–1971), who studied in the United States and became an editor for Japanese Women, observed in 1937, “WWI created a great ‘epoch’ for American women’s liberation.”76 A lecture by American feminist Lucia Hanna Hadley of the NWP, who visited Japan to research Japanese women between 1937 and 1938, confirmed this understanding. Hadley presented her paper “The Activities of American Women during the World War” at a WSL meeting in 1938 and contributed an article to the WSL journal Josei Tenbô.77 It was clear to WSL women that they stood little chance of gaining suffrage for the time being, yet with the American and European examples in mind they were able to sustain hope for women’s empowerment following wartime activism. They believed that demonstrating women’s potential in the public sphere was the way to gain suffrage in the future, just as their Western counterparts had done in the past.

Writing for Japanese Women As Hadley’s visit to Japan indicated, although U.S.-Japan diplomatic relations were worsening in 1938, the alliance between women from the two countries took a different course than that set by international politics in the late 1930s. In opposition to Japan’s official isolation policy, which had begun with its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, WSL women had been determined for some time to promote international communication and peace by maintaining ties with international women’s organizations. As Ichikawa had written in 1933, “We, as Japanese women, are ready to do our part [in the international women’s movement] in establishing an ideal society.”78 To achieve this, she asserted, “We [the WSL] should not follow

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the government’s isolationist policies. Rather, the more the government is isolated from the international community, the more we need to ease international tension by means of so-called ‘civil diplomats,’ who will focus on the promotion of international cooperation.”79 Clearly, these suffragists were determined to promote goodwill and peace internationally in the 1930s. To pursue their ideals, the WSL planned to strengthen friendship and mutual understanding with their Western counterparts. In this context, to send delegates to the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference (PPWC) became more significant than ever.80 For Ichikawa, the Third PPWC in 1934 in Honolulu was “an excellent chance to perform civil diplomacy.” Ichikawa was increasingly careful about the selection of delegates to ensure that her choices would be those who were able to demonstrate the capacity of Japanese women to promote peace. She wanted “capable delegates, by which I mean: firstly, women who promote international cooperation enthusiastically; secondly, women who also have an acute awareness of the problems [of today].”81 To fulfill this mission, three main delegates—Gauntlett Tsune, Katô Taka of the YWCAJ, and Koizumi Ikuko, a professor at Aoyama Jogakuin (Aoyama Woman’s School)—and three subdelegates were sent to the 1934 PPWC in Honolulu. As Katô Taka later noted, one of the successes of the 1934 PPWC was that all participants shared a keen awareness of the growing international crisis, which led them to pass a resolution to promote peace.82 More importantly, as a peace delegate for Japanese women, Koizumi had a marked impact on the policies of the era. She supported one of the resolutions of the 1934 PPWC, “Opposition to military education in the Pacific nations,” and specifically raised her voice against military education in Japanese schools across the region. This was against the flow of an increasingly nationalistic climate at home in Japan, where even the veteran feminist Hiratsuka Raichô supported military education in schools.83 In opposition to prevailing domestic opinion, Japanese delegates to international women’s conferences were determined to support both the international women’s cause and to promote peace and international cooperation. With this background, the 1934 PPWC chose Gauntlett to serve as the chairperson of the next conference, the Fourth PPWC in Vancouver in 1937. Gauntlett was well known in Western feminist circles as a Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union activist and as the president of the Women’s Peace Association in Japan. Japanese women’s enthusiastic support for peace must have been recognized by the 1934 PPWC; otherwise Gauntlett probably would not have been chosen as the next chairperson in the face of the Chinese delegation’s objection to her nomination. Moreover, she would not

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have been able to prepare for or carry out her responsibilities for the 1937 congress without support from her Japanese colleagues. These included traveling to China during the continuing conflict in 1936 to try to persuade Chinese internationalists to attend the next congress.84 The New York Times gave peace-minded Japanese women a high profile in 1937. In one article, it analyzed their roles within a militaristic society. It pointed out that “as a moral force in the nation, there is no doubt that the higher class women in Japan, definitely influenced by Christianity and western contacts, look beyond nationalism. . . . They may not be able to check the war march, but their influence will be a stumbling block to any arrogant, headlong foreign policy.”85 This article suggests that Japanese ­women’s efforts to promote peace via “civil diplomacy” were having a measure of success. Although these middle-class women had little influence on official diplomacy, as the New York Times highlighted, they at least showed that Japanese civilians had different ideas from those elements of society pushing to militarize Japan. More importantly, as in the 1920s, these suffragists continued to believe that the international feminist movement was mutually beneficial for both themselves and their foreign counterparts, and encouragement (what Ichikawa transliterated as “enkare-ji”) via international contact was a vital force in the movement.86 The reality for Western women was, by contrast, that contacts with Japanese women had less of an impact, as information had mainly flowed from the West to the East, and therefore information about Japanese women and the feminist movement in Japan was sparse.87 Only if Japanese women were able to make the conditions of the feminist movement in Japan more widely known would this fertilizing effect become satisfactorily reciprocal. With this intention, Ichikawa and Ôtsuki decided to publish a bimonthly journal in English called Japanese Women in 1938. As Ichikawa noted later, their purpose was “to give an accurate image of Japanese women to people overseas and to contribute to world peace.”88 WSL women had a strong desire to use this journal as means to portray Japanese women as representatives of the internationalist, pro-peace segment of the population. At the same time, in the context of worsening international relations, WSL women were greatly concerned that Western readers might think that the journal was government propaganda. Fearful that “anyone who is on a goodwill mission is viewed as a person who explains the position of the government,”89 Ichikawa and Ôtsuki chose to print ideas that had come to be understood “by the Japanese themselves and welcomed by the Americans as well”—what they called “cultural propaganda,” which they saw as advocacy for Japanese women and culture as distinct from the Japanese government.90

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The journal therefore featured human stories of the experiences of Japanese women living in contemporary Japanese society; articles about the history of Japanese women; and women’s roles in and contributions to society and culture, including women in traditional festivals, women in factories and agriculture, and professional women. It also highlighted the passage of the Mother and Child Protection Act as a remarkable success for the unified women’s rights movement led by the WSL.91 At the same time, Ichikawa acknowledged that cooperating with both the government and the government-sponsored women’s organizations placed suffragists in a difficult position and asked their Western counterparts to understand their choice. “We are trying not only to muster them [government-sponsored women’s organizations] but in some cases cooperating with them to carry out certain programs.”92 Ichikawa argued in 1938 that empowerment of women was possible through cooperation with the government and other women. Therefore it was consistent for Ichikawa, who chose to cooperate with the government, speaking of an eventual peace settlement after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), to insist that “women’s cooperation is required for its success,” and “genuine cooperation between the women of China and Japan is an absolute pre-requisite for the permanent peace of both countries.” This was despite her realization both of Westerners’ increasing suspicion about Japan’s belligerence and of Chinese women’s understandably strong antagonism toward Japan.93 Yet the dilemma of either struggling for autonomy from government’s power or cooperating with it was ever more serious in 1940. Ichikawa confessed that “the leaders of women’s organizations of [an] autonomous nature who have for long carried on active work, are also in most cases negative and are satisfied by confining themselves to the special activities they have been carrying on up to the present time.”94 Addressing successes and problems in the women’s movement in Japan, WSL women wanted to appeal to Western women with the message that the real lives and experiences of Japanese women were not fundamentally different from those of Western people but at the same time were distinctively shaped by different cultural and historical experiences. For example, Fujita Taki (1898–1993), who studied at Bryn Mawr College and taught at Tsuda English School (Tsuda Eigaku Juku, the former name of Joshi Eigaku Juku), articulated the complexity of this issue: “Women are women all over the world. Japanese women too, for instance, madly pursue the fashion of the day. . . . [Yet the] westernization which you notice in every phase of our modern life is chiefly on the surface. Our spiritual, moral, philosophical traditions nurtured and developed since the dawn of our race still continue

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to be the guiding principles of Japanese women of to-day.”95 Women like Fujita thought that the Westernization of Japan was on a relatively superficial level but that beneath this there was women’s national identity, which was forged by historically specific experiences. Yet, as Japanese women demonstrated, this did not necessarily confine women to national boundaries. Putting it slightly differently, the writer Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985) argued that “mankind is divided by difference in race, climate, customs, manners, and political and social systems, but humanity is essentially one in its fundamental needs, desires and aspirations.”96 The journal showed that Japanese women’s experiences and ideas were distinctive, having been shaped in a specific time and culture, yet they were part of women’s universal efforts to advance to a more humanistic society. The WSL sent copies of Japanese Women to potential readers in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in Japan, and to colleges, women’s organizations, and individuals. In spite of Ôtsuki’s initial concerns about “how experienced feminists in the West would accept our Journal,” the WSL received warm feedback immediately after publishing the first issue.97 For example, Ellen Brinton, curator for the Jane Addams Peace Collection at Swarthmore College, celebrated the success of the first issue and wrote: I think you are doing a brave work. If I can read between the lines properly you are voicing some view of a minority group just about the same way that Jane Addams and some of her associates did during the World War. This Jane Addams Peace Collection would be glad to have from you further publications either in Japanese or other languages.98 As Brinton indicated, the journal was accepted as a peace message from women in Japan. In certain passages in the journal, Brinton found the same roots of feminist consciousness and struggles to reform society that American social justice feminists such as Jane Addams had experienced. Likewise, the WSL received encouraging letters that contained requests for subscriptions to the journal from many institutions and individuals in the United States and the United Kingdom.99 As was evident in these letters, Japanese Women was an important tool to connect women in the West and Japan. In 1938, Japanese feminists felt isolated from other women. As one feminist wrote in the November issue of the journal, “In the present situation contacts with the so-called international organizations are almost entirely severed.”100 Nevertheless, they were able to maintain some ties through letters that Western feminists sent to the editors

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of the journal. “I want to congratulate you on your paper and tell you how very deeply it interests me, and what a link I feel it to be with the women in Japan,” wrote Katherine Bompas, secretary of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship. Olive Beale, secretary to Alice Paul, who served as chairperson of the World Woman’s Party, wrote, “Miss Paul wants you to know that the Japanese Women is displayed on our table for periodicals, where everyone who comes in may see it.”101 Japanese Women was a useful tool for the international women’s rights movement—not only for Japanese feminists but also for those in the West.

The Gap between American and Japanese Women Widens Women from both sides seemed to have promoted peace based on mutual understanding and internationalist feminist consciousness, yet this friendly relationship was vulnerable to growing international tension and the effects of nationalism. In 1937, WILPF issued a recommendation to its National Sections to urge each government to refuse imports from Japan and to prevent the extension of official and private loans and credits to the Japanese government.102 Similarly, American feminists were increasingly critical of Japan’s aggressive war policies. For example, American feminists from the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War were against the renewal of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act with Japan that would expire in June 1940. They demanded that the U.S. government should not help Japan economically by renewing the trade agreements with Japan, but instead it should provide help to China.103 Given the fact that these American feminists were actively promoting peace, it was inevitable that the peace cause led them to support economic sanctions against Japan, which was engaged in aggression abroad. However, for their Japanese counterparts, economic sanctions were a women’s issue. In this context, Japanese Women raised a question about the fairness of American women’s support of an international embargo in a short article. Tanaka Teruko, president of the Japanese branch of the American Association of University Women, criticized American women for their support of an embargo. The journal quoted Tanaka’s story: They [Japanese goods] are products of peaceful workers such as peasants who are raising silk worms. By refusing to buy, you are unknowingly placing the innocent women and children here under added hardships instead of curtailing military action as generally supposed.104

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Pointing out that American women’s boycott of Japanese goods threatened Japanese women’s economic welfare, the journal urged American women to lift their support of the embargo. Moreover, realizing that women’s international relations were getting more and more complicated, in 1940 WSL members sent a message to American women through Japanese Women and requested them to reaffirm friendly relations based on common gender ties. Hayashi Uta, who had participated in both the NCCCW meeting and the London Naval Conference in 1930, beseeched them, “Why not, then, transcend petty national boundaries and be friends now and forever?”105

The Suspension of Suffragist Activism However, although WSL members believed that international friendships could transcend the geographical and mental boundaries between America and Japan, Japan’s totalitarian regime exacerbated the differences. Cooperating with the government, which planned to reorganize all national life under Taisei Yokusa Kai, or the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, WSL women saw the complete impracticability of achieving suffrage, disbanded the WSL, and gave up their independence in August 1940.106 The Institute for the Research of Women’s Problems (Fujinmondai Kenkyûsho), the branch of the WSL responsible for Japanese Women, expected to continue publishing it, but it ceased. They stopped publication themselves by submitting an official notice to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police as they anticipated that they would soon be ordered to stop in any case. By early 1941, Japanese suffragists had chosen to confine themselves to promoting the women’s rights movement within their national boundaries. Clearly, in the midst of such a reactionary social climate, they did not have an alternative if they wanted to promote the women’s rights movement in an “acceptable” way. In such limited conditions, WSL women tried to grasp any opportunity to promote the women’s movement, negotiating where possible within a repressive situation. Did the WSL women give up on their core belief in acting on their own initiative and succumb completely in the 1940s to an intensified patriarchy, ultranationalism, and militarism? While they decided not to challenge the nationalist discourse, they did seek to retain their voice in some way by initiating discussions on planning women’s integration into the government cause. Before disbanding, the WSL had proposed a plan to the government for unifying women’s organizations. As with their previous efforts in the 1930s, the suffragists saw this as a way for the government to incorporate women’s perspectives. Accordingly, in February 1941 the government passed

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a bill that was intended to merge government-sponsored organizations with the Federation of Japanese Women’s Organizations, which had previously been autonomous. The bottom line in forming the new women’s organization was to mobilize every woman to support the government and the military’s totalitarian, nationalist, and expansionist ambitions. To pursue this overarching goal, the bill stipulated that “the purpose of the new women’s organization is to cultivate women’s character and to discipline women in the traditions of Japanese womanhood.”107 The government emphasized the collective role of women as pillars of the patriarchal family system, based on the “family-state” ideology, in which family was defined “as a basic unit of the ruling order of the state.”108 To promote this ideology, the government perceived the need to eliminate Western progressive ideas and demands for individual rights from society. Thus, the minister of war, Tôjô Hideki, announced that harmful Western influences, including a tendency to be negligent of women’s essential duties, should be removed upon the formation of the new women’s organization.109 Ichikawa supported the government’s basic idea to unify women’s organizations and to impose the state’s discourse on women. Looking for any role in society that might still be attainable, she indicated that even if the government supervised the new organization, its day-to-day practical management should be left to women.110 Within this much narrower space for advocating individual rights, she sought to steer other women’s organizations where possible toward promoting women’s autonomy in carrying out wartime civil activity. Ichikawa’s approval for the government idea of unifying women’s organizations under their control suggests that she tacitly accepted the state’s rhetoric, which saw Western ideology as a “harmful influence” over Japanese society. Ichikawa’s struggle to promote women’s use of their own initiative under totalitarian government coincided with her criticism of American women’s ideology, which she described as “liberal optimism.” In April 1941, in an open letter to American women, Ichikawa argued that the American model of social activism, based on the celebration of individualism as the premise for effective social action, was not suitable for Japanese women within the traditional structure of Japanese male-dominated society. Ichikawa described Japanese women’s acceptance of civic roles that bowed to the government’s family-state creed, asserting that, “for Japanese women, the notion of the household is equal to that of the nation.”111 Ichikawa’s change of opinion was unexpected. After all, she had gained vital impetus for the suffrage cause from American models in which the idea of individual rights was strongly

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present; she had witnessed American feminists using newly gained status as full voting citizens to reform society; and even before this she had been challenging Japanese patriarchy. Yet this letter showed that WSL suffragists had decided to give up the internationalist women’s cause in order to support the state. This marked the period in which the WSL strengthened their strategic support of the national cause. It also marked the end, for the time being, of the promotion of feminism and peace through international gender alliance. Though still having large numbers of its population engaged in agriculture, Japan had since the late nineteenth century been moving rapidly from a closed, feudal, agrarian economy toward an industrial one with ever-heightening military and imperialistic ambitions, and it was trying to mobilize its entire people for its nationalist aims, regardless of the fact that women were excluded from policy-making institutions. In the 1930s, as Japanese military adventures attracted foreign criticism, it adopted isolationism. However, government policy had the paradoxical effect of pushing Japanese middle-class women reformers to promote the women’s rights movement, forging ways that they saw as necessary and practicable. Nationally, they explored how to be involved in the government’s civil measures in order to push domestic boundaries and maximize the social space for women. More importantly, what lay behind the women’s motivation to cooperate with the state was the desire to influence the government toward making its policies inclusive. Until 1940 the women tried to maintain international gender ties toward promoting international cooperation and world peace. This strong desire to promote peace through women was evident in Ichikawa’s letter to the Belgian feminist la Baronne Pol Boël, published in Japanese Women in 1940 as a message to the world’s women: “We ardently hope at this juncture, when international relations are getting more and more delicate and complicated, that women of different nations may get to know of each other better, so that they may be able to cooperate towards the end of establishing a better world order.”112 In Ichikawa’s view, Japanese women shared the common goals of international feminism of the era, equality and peace, even though evolving historical conditions forced Ichikawa to give up the international cause in 1941. As the war between America and Japan was becoming unavoidable, these suffragists who were represented by Ichikawa abstained from promoting what she saw as the Western, relatively individualist version of the women’s rights movement and suspended contacts with American feminists by 1941. Instead, they focused their attention on nationalist work assigned by the government, within which they continued to look for

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opportunities to advance women’s interests in ways particular to Japan that had evolved over the preceding decades. Recognizing that they were not legally entitled to public positions, they believed that they had no choice other than cooperation with the state.113 Not all of their contemporaries took this position; some socialist women refused to cooperate with the government and suspended public activities, and other socialist women took the risks involved in continuing with activities that were then against the law.114 Nevertheless, WSL women believed that their chosen strategies were the best way to empower women and to reform society in the long term, following the experiences of their Western counterparts in World War I. As Japan resumed its progress toward “a democratic, civilized state (bunka kokka)” following Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers on August 15, 1945, a new phase of the feminist movement began.115 Women who had been suffragists in the prewar period reemerged as strong advocates of social reform, global equality, and peace.116 Suffrage was in the end achieved quickly, amid complex circumstances, in response to internal and external pressure, as is explained in the Epilogue. Suffragists such as Ichikawa thought that the imposition of suffrage by the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP) led by General MacArthur was inevitable, but middle-class suffragists used their official contacts and the nationalism they shared with politicians to achieve uncharacteristically swift government action to salvage national pride by preemptively announcing an agreement in principle to women’s suffrage. On August 25, 1945, a few days before the beginning of the occupation of Japan, women who had been activists before the war, including Ichikawa Fusae and Gauntlett Tsune, organized the Women’s Committee on Postwar Countermeasures (Sengo Taisaku Fujin Iinkai). They wished to take the initiative in dealing with postwar chaos in Japan and to take advantage of this historic opportunity for women’s empowerment to secure women’s rights and create a space for women in the newly emerging postwar political structures. They wanted to initiate indigenous reform and achieve suffrage as the result of their own struggles, not as a gift from foreign pressure. Through its various personal connections the committee lobbied the government, asking it to grant women suffrage before it was forced to do so by the occupation force. The initial response was cool, but on October 4, 1945, MacArthur met with Konoe Fumimaro, who was acting as a minister without portfolio for the short-lived Higashikuni Cabinet (August 17–October 9, 1945). At the meeting with Konoe, MacArthur described his plans for reforming Japan. As well as the revision of the Meiji Constitution, the granting of political rights

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to workers, and the dissolution of the National Diet, it became clear that woman’s suffrage was going to be imposed.117 The next week, as Ichikawa and members of the Women’s Committee on Postwar Countermeasures had hoped, the newly formed Shidehara Cabinet (October  9, 1945–May 22, 1946), at their first meeting on October 10, unanimously decided to grant women’s suffrage, thereby just managing to preempt one of MacArthur’s five major reform orders, which were issued the next day on October 11, 1945. MacArthur instructed Prime Minister Shidehara Kijûrô to implement the “Five Major Reform Directives.” These covered “emancipation of women through enfranchisement; encouragement of the unionization of labor; opening of the schools to a more liberal system of education; abolition of systems through which secret inquisitions and abuses kept the people in constant fear; and reform of monopolistic control of industry and democratization of the economy.”118 In due course, women’s suffrage was approved by the government in December 1945, when election legislation was amended to allow all men and women over twenty to vote. Japanese women were first able to vote in a national election on April 10, 1946, and in local elections in September 1946.119 This preceded by some time the new Constitution of Japan, which did not come into full effect until May 3, 1947, and this speed was partly because of all the work done by the Japanese suffrage movement. Looking at the suffrage movement promoted over this decade by the WSL from an international viewpoint, we can see that these Japanese suffragists clearly foresaw that the goal of the feminist movement lay in activism and alliance beyond national boundaries. They not only believed that sharing women’s experiences in specific national contexts would empower all women; they also recognized that women’s empowerment was necessary to combat social injustice everywhere in a world dominated by the rule of men over women.

Conclusion Mankind is divided by difference in race, climate, customs, manners, and political and social systems, but humanity is essentially one in its fundamental needs, desires and aspirations. . . . What is so badly needed by us today is to place our hope in the future and never get disheartened by the endless dark road that might stretch before us. All that matters is to go on. Nogami Yaeko,1 “Reminiscences of My Trip Abroad”

T

he writer Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985) wrote the passage in this epigraph in her short essay for Japanese Women. Nogami toured the world between 1938 and 1939. She made the trip at a critical time in history, with China and Japan fighting a war and the world lurching into the chaos of World War II. Her trip ranged through Asia, Egypt, and southern and northern Europe and included evacuating from Europe to America. ­Nogami’s experiences of kindly shared fellowship with the men and women she met convinced her that “what I deemed good was also upheld by them, and what is bad in my opinion was also disapproved by them.” She was one of a number of feminists worldwide in the first half of the twentieth century who believed that the goal of the feminist movement was to achieve one just and humanitarian society. Nogami knew well that the sociopolitical and cultural conditions of her era hindered this goal, yet she refused to be cowed, saying, “Why not change the whole desert of the human world into a verdant oasis, no matter how long it may take?”2 Nogami’s words represent the determination of the women in this study to overcome the contradictions and tensions in feminism that emerged in the period up to 1941. They struggled to resolve the tension between the desire for universal equality through shared values and the desire to protect the rich specificity of national cultures, and the tension between internationalism and the sometimes severe limitations of our location in time and place. These tensions are especially apparent where modern ideas about equality clash directly with nationalism and deep-seated tradition. Parallels with

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twenty-first-century struggles around the world and in Japan spring readily to mind, making Japan’s feminism and its interactive exchange of ideas with Western counterparts between 1871 and 1941 a useful paradigm worthy of continued study and reflection. Undoubtedly most of the middle-class Japanese women in this book, like their Western counterparts before them, failed to address their nation’s colonialism or escape from the rhetoric of war cooperation. But to achieve a properly nuanced study of feminism, it is necessary to take a view that is international and takes full account of the national cultural and political conditions of the time. It is fair to say that Japanese women created a unique Japanese style of feminism that utilized the specific contradictions in Japan’s modernization. In this book, I have examined the development of feminist consciousness among Japanese urban middle-class women, which was largely forged through contacts with American women reformers, by providing analytical and historical overviews and three case studies: the peace, birth control, and suffrage movements. As I have shown in Chapter 1, beginning in the late nineteenth century Japan aggressively implemented Westernization policies and hoped to gain swift recognition as a modern, “civilized” nation on the model of the Western powers, including Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United Sates. However, despite nominal acceptance that the social status of women was an indication of the degree of the civilization of nations, the women of both the Western powers and Japan occupied secondary positions in society. Restricted from fully participating in society, both Western and Japanese women argued strongly for equality using the premise that equality between the sexes was a prerequisite for civilization. Western women had made progress and were forming women’s networks across national borders to expand the range of the movement worldwide. Japanese women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were more rigidly situated as males’ dependents by law and custom, making it difficult for them to promote a strong and flourishing women’s rights movement. Nevertheless, in the early twentieth century, Japanese middle-class feminists began a full-scale feminist movement in Japan. In Chapter 2, I have offered a broad historical overview of the international feminist movement that catalyzed the development of a Japanese feminist movement up to 1930. For example, in the 1928 Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, Jane Addams called for an awakening to women’s unique position and role in modern civilization through the exchange of ideas between women from different sociocultural and historical backgrounds. Addams believed that sharing women’s various experiences and struggles was essential to

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solving the problems encountered by women around the world. She emphasized, “I am sure the interchange of achievement and honest opinion in this ­women’s conference of ours will give us all new courage and enthusiasm and that we shall realize as we go along that many problems cannot possibly be solved by any one country, unless their solution is undertaken by other countries as well.”3 Japanese feminists such as Gauntlett Tsune shared this conviction. She argued that “whatever topics were discussed [at the PPWC], we came to understand that we had to put such topics into an international, as well as national perspective. . . . Since women see and feel about matters with a different perspective, with such a perspective women could build strong international relationships.”4 As these opinions indicate, the early-twentiethcentury feminists cited in this book recognized the linkages in their lives despite differences in class, nation, and culture, and so found common interests with others who lived in modern civilization. This understanding led them to ally internationally to struggle against the proliferation of problems created by the globalized modern economy. Japanese feminists increasingly realized that participating in the international feminist movement would facilitate the empowerment of women in misogynous and imperialistic Japan. But they also realized that there were restrictions and limits to applying Western-style strategies to the problem of how to advance the position of women, given Japan’s distinct sociopolitical circumstances at the time. For example, after its inception in 1921, while promoting international goodwill and friendship, the Women’s Peace Association in Japan (WPAJ) gradually broadened the scope of its activism in collaboration with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). The visit of WILPF president Jane Addams to Japan and the WPAJ leaders’ participation in international peace meetings encouraged the internationalization of the WPAJ’s activities in the 1920s. By 1930, peace activism through collaboration with Western women had led the WPAJ to recognize that they were “women of the world” as well as women of Japan. However, in the course of promoting the peace movement, WPSJ women decided to negotiate with Japan’s patriarchal, nationalistic, and militaristic climate, rather than to directly oppose it from an internationalist position, particularly after the Manchurian Incident in 1931. As we have seen, in considering the birth control movement in Japan, special note must be taken of the role played by Ishimoto Shidzue. As the wife of Baron Ishimoto Keikichi, she had married into an aristocratic family and experienced the strong social pressures and legal constraints imposed on women like her under the official “good wife and wise mother” notion of womanhood. Ishimoto recognized that the lack of control over reproduction

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was a root cause of poverty and a symptom of oppression across classes and national borders. Her advocacy of birth control and her dissemination of the methods, materials, and information about family planning, using an approach acquired from contact with Margaret Sanger, was her attempt to liberate Japanese women by helping them to gain control of reproduction. In Japan, however, the discourse of the family-state ideology firmly tied women to the interests of the state, which encouraged women to contribute to and participate in its nationalistic and militaristic programs by having as many children as possible. Ishimoto linked the birth control movement in Japan with the international feminist movement, which advocated equality and peace. Through her network of American liberals and feminists, while criticizing Japan’s official policies, Ishimoto showed that Japanese women shared the same concerns as American people. I have focused on the Women’s Suffrage League (WSL) and its activism to show how WSL women navigated through the discourses of the Western feminist movement and Japan’s patriarchal society to achieve their goals, despite increasing militarism and nationalism in the 1930s. The members of the WSL, represented in this book by Ichikawa Fusae and Gauntlett Tsune, gained impetus, knowledge, and methods for the suffrage movement and social reform through contact with American suffragists. These women believed that gender equality and peace were women’s issues that transcended national and cultural differences, and that promotion of the women’s rights movements in alliance with international women’s organizations was mutually beneficial for women of Japanese and other nationalities. At the same time, in spite of the government’s misogynistic policies, they strategically collaborated with the state; in particular, they participated in works assigned by the government under the Network Committee in the Central League for the National Spiritual Mobilization. Because they chose to cooperate with government war measures, WSL women ultimately came to suspend their participation in the activities of the international feminist movement. I would argue that a number of things flowed from the movements described. Middle-class Japanese feminists, who had the means and opportunity to gain direct access to the knowledge and methods of the feminist movement originating in Western civilization, broadened their perspective about gender relations in Japanese society. The international contacts through international women’s conferences organized by Western feminists, their writings, and the acquisition of effective methods for social reform through direct contact and friendship were crucial resources for Japanese reformers in promoting the women’s rights movement in Japan. They also helped Japanese women to identify themselves as actors for the international

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feminist movement based on concerns and struggles shared by women around the world. Despite the dominant nature of the discourse of international feminism promoted by Western feminists, Japanese feminists were nevertheless selective in their participation in it. Japanese women carefully adapted American feminists’ methods, using them in ways that they judged would be most effective in the context of Japanese patriarchal society, which legally and socially held women back from full participation in society. Viewed from the perspective of Japanese middle-class women reformers, the relationship between Western and Japanese feminists was cooperative and mutually beneficial. Japanese feminists adapted and adopted ideas and methods for social reform provided by their American counterparts to promote women’s rights movements in Japan. Japanese feminists were empowered by participating in gender-based international communities under pressure from increasingly militarizing and nationalizing Japanese society. Western feminists were able in return to broaden their perspectives on the feminist movement through such intercultural contacts. Feminism allowed participants to cross the boundaries between various differences and to coexist internationally, while remaining vitally connected to their local contexts. Middle-class Japanese women tailored their own movement through negotiation within the domestic master narratives of nationalism and militarism as well as within the overarching concerns of feminism in the West. As confidence in “civilization” waned in the early twentieth century, Japanese feminists, while working with the assumptions and goals of the Western feminists’ humanitarian project, proved themselves subtle enough to advance their cause within the misogynistic and militaristic society of Japan. In particular, they tried to achieve the difficult task of reconciling feminism with national interests. This study indicates that women’s alliances have the ability to form beyond national borders. What Chandra Talpade Mohanty and others call the formation of “imagined communities” is a powerful resource in the struggle against political, economic, and social injustice in a modern, capitalist patriarchy. It also shows that both American and Japanese feminists envisioned different gender roles than those assigned by their nations, and they promoted a more advanced, peaceful, and humanitarian civilization. Experiencing the tension between national interests and those of women as a whole, the recognition of the international commonality of women facilitated action, not only for their own liberation but also to end structural oppression under modern patriarchy.

Epilogue: Postwar Continuity 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

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

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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 with all women in general, had historically always been active agents, an understanding that she had come to partly through her research into Japanese

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women in the 1920s.9 As Beard wrote to Weed later, in 1947, “I do hope that I can make clear the quality of the Japanese heritage upon which a more democratic order can be constructed—provided the Japanese get enough time to do that.”10 Beard believed in Japan’s and Japanese women’s native traditional capacity to reform society. Of course, there inevitably existed unequal power relations between the American occupiers and the occupied Japanese. Some Japanese prewar reformers were purged from public service for their involvement in government war activism. For example, Ichikawa Fusae was unable either to run as a member of the National Diet (Congress) or to hold a public position from 1947 to 1950, because she was banned as a result of her activities as a director of the Great Japan Press Association (Dai Nihon Genron Hôkokukai).11 For some American women, on the other hand, such as Women’s Army Corps servicewomen, working for the GHQ/SCAP provided the opportunity to raise their social position and to exercise power as agents of the occupation army. Even so, Japanese women after World War II did not merely acquiesce to a Western-dominated mission to “advance” Oriental women. Rather, like Beard, and like earlier Japanese activists, they envisioned an inclusive rather than a hierarchical relationship with women in different cultures and promoted the achievement of a peaceful and equal society. To pursue these goals, while these Japanese women negotiated with male-dominated institutions domestically, they resumed their international alliances with other women. They did so because they had learned from earlier experiences that they must not be content with maintaining the status quo but rather needed to work internationally to eliminate sociopolitical and economic injustice in any given society. For example, Japanese women including Hiratsuka Raichô, Ichikawa Fusae, and Jôdai Tano called widely for “demilitarization, neutralization, and comprehensive peace,” including being against nuclear weaponry, and they objected to the negotiation and ratification of the Peace Treaty of Japan (the San Francisco Peace Treaty) in September 1951, signed by Japan and forty-seven other nations, most of which had been aligned with the Allied Powers. In addition to marking the end of World War II, making provision for compensation for victims of Japanese war crimes and aggression, and officially ending Japan’s status as an imperial power, the treaty positioned Japan as part of the U.S.-led Western bloc in the new world order of the Cold War. The women objected because they desired full neutrality for Japan, whereas the treaty effectively allied Japan with America, as China, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Czechoslovakia, and Poland were not signatories. To show their deep concern and strong

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opposition, they wrote three letters to John Foster Dulles, consultant to the U.S. secretary of state between 1950 and 1951, including “Gist of the Hopes of Japanese Women.”12 They also organized the Women’s Committee for Anti-Rearmament (Saigunbi Hantai Fujiniinkai) in December 1951 and sent a letter of appeal to the U.S. Senate via WILPF. The committee requested U.S. senators to process the treaty and Japan-U.S. security arrangements with a critical eye, given that many Japanese people disagreed with the Japanese government’s decision.13 Such grassroots activism had little chance to influence governments, yet without it they knew that their voice and will to create a humanitarian society would be completely marginalized. In their attempts to counteract the hegemonic discourse of civilization, these women pursued mutual interests in forming constructive cross-border relationships. They allied both to make the world a better place and to realize their ideals locally, so that every individual could make the most out of her or his life. To achieve this goal, they saw that women needed to engage in the international women’s rights movement to work together toward peace, birth control, and equality. As we have seen, Japanese women had themselves helped to forge the foundations for this international strategy of empowerment over the many preceding decades.

Appendix A: Notable People

All people listed are female unless otherwise stated. Abe Isoo (1865–1949): Japanese male Christian socialist and birth control advocate who helped publish Sekai Fujin (Women of the World) Addams, Jane (1865–1935): American social reformer, pioneer settlement worker, suffragist, peace activist and the first WILPF president Ashby, Corbett (1882–1981): British suffragist who served as president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance from 1923 to 1946 and wrote a letter to Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi in 1929, urging him to enfranchise women Atomi Kakei (1840–1926): Japanese educator who taught the importance of Japanese traditional culture and developed a friendship with Mary Ritter Beard Balch, Emily Greene (1867–1961): American economist, a founder of WILPF, and international secretary for WILPF Beard, Charles (1874–1948): American historian, political scientist, and husband of Mary Ritter Beard who visited Japan in 1922 and 1923, gave city planning advice to the Tokyo city government, and advised on post-earthquake reconstruction Beard, Mary Ritter (1876–1958): American historian and social reformer who visited Japan in 1922 and 1923, researched and developed friendships with Japanese women, and advised Ethel Weed after World War II

138  Appendix A: Notable People

Bompas, Katherine (?–?): Secretary of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship Brinton, Ellen (1886–1954): American Quaker and internationalist who was the first curator for the Jane Addams Peace Collection at Swarthmore College Catt, Carrie Chapman (1859–1947): American suffrage and women’s rights move­ ment leader and pacifist who visited Japan in 1912 Crowdy, Rachel E. (1884–1964): British social reformer and chief of the De­ partment of Opium Traffic and Social Issues Section of the League of Nations Fawcett, Millicent Garrett (1847–1929): British suffragist who issued the “Inter­ national Manifesto of Women” to the British Foreign Office and to foreign embas­ sies in London in 1914 Fujita Taki (1898–1993): Japanese suffragist a professor at the Tsuda English School and a delegate to the 1928 Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927): Japanese socialist who published the socialist wom­ en’s newspaper Sekai Fujin (Women of the World) between 1907 and 1909 Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901): Japanese male educational theorist and influential Westernizer sympathetic to feminism within the upper class Gauntlett Tsune (1873–1953): Japanese peace and suffrage movements activist who served as leader of the JWCTU, director of the WPAJ, and chair for the PPWC in 1937 Gordon, Beate Sirota (1923–2012): Austrian-born American who lived in Tokyo for ten years before moving to the United States for her college education; she came back to Japan in 1945 as a staff member for political affairs at GHQ/SCAP and drafted language granting legal equality between the sexes in Articles 14 and 24 of the new Constitution of Japan Hadley, Lucia Hanna (?–?): American member of the National Women’s Party who visited Japan to research Japanese women between 1937 and 1938 Hamaguchi Osachi (1870–1931): Japanese male politician who introduced a lim­ ited extension of a women’s franchise bill Hatoyama Haruko (1861–1938): Japanese educator who was one of founders of Kyôritsu Joshi Shokugyô Gakkô (Kyôritsu Women’s Vocational School) in 1886.

Appendix A: Notable People  139

Hayashi Uta (1865–1946): Japanese social reform activist and founder of the Osaka WCTU who was active in the suffrage, peace, and antiprostitution movements and participated in both the NCCCW meeting and the London Naval Conference in 1930 Hinder, Eleanor M. (1893–1963): Australian delegate and conference program secretary to the 1928 Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference Hiratsuka Raichô (1886–1971): Japanese writer, critic, and thinker who founded the Seitôsha, served as editor of Seitō, and cofounded of the New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai) Ichikawa Fusae (1893–1981): Japanese labor union activist and editor of the Yûaikai bulletin Rôdôfujin (Working Women), who traveled to America to research the women’s rights and suffrage movement and was a leading member of the Women’s Suffrage League Inoue Hideko (1875–1963): Japanese professor at Japan’s Women’s University who served as president of the Ofu-Kai and as the first president of the Women’s Peace Association in Japan and was a delegate to International Disarmament Week in 1921 Ishikawa Sanshirô (1876–1956): Japanese male Christian socialist, anarchist, and pacifist who was a member of the Heiminsha and Fukuda Hideko’s de facto husband Ishimoto (Katô) Shidzue (1897–2001): Japanese birth control and family planning activist and politician who divorced Baron Ishimoto Keikichi and married Kato Kanjûrô Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863–1942): Japanese male journalist and educator who published Jogaku Zasshi (Women’s Education Journal ), helped promote the JWCTU, and served as principal of the Meiji Girls’ School (Meiji Jogakkô) Jacobs, Aletta (1854–1929): Dutch suffragist, pacifist, and physician who was a leading member of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and WILPF; she visited Japan in 1912 with Carrie Chapman Catt for the suffrage campaign and was one of the ICWPP (WILPF) members who first communicated with people in Japan in 1915 Jôdai Tano (1886–1982): Japanese Quaker and peace activist who was a professor at Japan Women’s University, served as secretary to the WPAJ, and read a paper at the Fifth WILPF Congress in Dublin in 1926

140  Appendix A: Notable People

Kaji (Katô) Tokijirô (1858–1930): Japanese male social reformer, physician, birth control promoter, and founder of Commoners’ Hospital (Heimin Byôin) Kaneko (Yamataka) Shigeri (1899–1977): Japanese suffragist who was a cofounder of the Women’s Suffrage League and a leading promoter of the Mother and Child Protection Act movement Kanno Suga (1881–1911): Japanese socialist, anarchist, journalist, and activist who was executed after the Great Treason Trial Katô Kanjû (1892–1978): Japanese male labor movement leader and politician who was married to Ishimoto Shidzue Katô Shidzue (see Ishimoto [Katô] Shidzue) Katô Taka (1887–1979): Japanese Christian women’s rights activist who was a leader of the Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan and a delegate to the 1934 Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu Kawakami Isamu (?–?): Japanese male peace movement activist who served as general secretary of the men’s peace organization, the Japan Peace Society (Dai Nihon Heiwa Kyôkai) and maintained Japanese communication with the ICWPP (WILPF) until the foundation of the women’s association became solid Kawasaki Natsu (1889–1966): Japanese suffragist, birth control advocate, and educator who was a member of the New Women’s Association and a personal advice columnist for Yomiuri Shimbun Kishida Toshiko (also known as Nakajima Shôen) (1864–1901): Japanese writer and public speaker who participated in the Freedom and People’s Rights movement (Jiyû Minken Undô) and was imprisoned after she read her paper “Daughters Raised in Boxes” (Hakoiri musume) in 1883 Koizumi (Shimizu) Ikuko (1892–1964): Japanese educator, professor at Aoyama Woman’s School (Aoyama Jogakuin), and delegate to the 1934 Pan-Pacific Wom­ en’s Conference in Honolulu Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945): Japanese male politician who acted as a minister without portfolio for the Higashikuni Cabinet (August 17–October 9, 1945) and met with General MacArthur before MacArthur issued the Five Major Reform Directives Kôtoku Shûsui (1871–1911): Japanese male thinker, socialist, anarchist, pacifist and cofounder of the Heiminsha who was executed after the Great Treason Trial

Appendix A: Notable People  141

Kubushiro Ochimi (1882–1972): leader of the JWCTU who was active in the suffrage, peace, and antiprostitution movements Kusunose Kita (1836–1920): Japanese activist who participated in the Freedom and People’s Rights movement (Jiyû Minken Undô) in Kôchi prefecture and demanded the vote for women in a local election in 1878 Macmillan, Chrystal (1872–1932): British suffragist and pacifist who issued the “International Manifesto of Women” to the British Foreign Office and to foreign embassies in London in 1914; she was one of the founders of WILPF and one of the ICWPP (WILPF) members who first communicated with people in Japan Mori Arinori (1847–1889): Japanese male educator who was a cofounder of the Meirokusha and served as a minister of education; he linked the traditional view of womanhood with the Western one and promoted a new official womanhood, “good wife and wise mother” Moriya Azuma (1884–1975): Japanese JWCTU leader who accompanied Yajima Kajiko to the 1921 International Disarmament Week in the United States Niizuma Ito (1890–1963): Japanese educator and social reformer who was a member of the executive committee of a proletarian group, the Kantô Women’s League (Kantô Fujin Dômei) Nishikawa Fumiko (1882–1960): Japanese socialist member of the Commoners’ Society (Heiminsha) who organized the New True Women Association (Shin Shin Fujinkai) Nitobe Inazô (1862–1933): Japanese male educator and internationalist who held the Women’s Study Group of International Issues in 1919 and served as undersecretary-general to the League of Nations Nitobe, Mary Elkinton (1857–1938): American Quaker social activist from Philadelphia and the wife of internationalist Nitobe Inazô who supported Japanese women in their organization of the peace association Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985): Japanese writer who traveled through Asia, Europe, and the United States between 1938 and 1939 and published a three-volume book on her extensive travels: Obei no Tabi (Journey to Europe and America) Oku Mumeo (1895–1997): Japanese journalist who wrote for a working-class women’s magazine and was a cofounder of the New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai)

142  Appendix A: Notable People

Ôtsuki Terue (1904–1971): Japanese suffragist who served as editor of Japanese Women and was a professor at Japan Women’s University Paul, Alice (1885–1977): American suffragette and cofounder of the National Woman’s Party who advised Ichikawa Fusae to promote only the suffrage movement Sakai (Kondô) Magara (1903–1983): Japanese socialist who cofounded the Red Wave Society (Sekirankai), a socialist women’s group Sakai Tameko (1872–1959): Japanese socialist who was a member of the Com­ moners’ Society (Heiminsha) and stepmother of Sakai (Kondô) Magara Sanger, Margaret (1879–1966): American birth control movement advocate who inspired and supported Ishimoto Shidzue, who wanted to promote the birth control movement in Japan Shimoda Utako (1854–1936): Japanese educator who served as a dean of the Peeress School, founded the Jissen Girls’ School, and advocated the official view of womanhood, “good wife and wise mother” Stevens, Doris (1892–1963): American suffragist and internationalist who was a leading member of the Inter-American Commission of Women and author of Jailed for Freedom Stritt, Marie (1855–1928): German feminist and member of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Suzuki Bunji (1885–1946): Japanese male Christian social reformer and labor movement leader who founded the Yûaikai labor union Tanaka Teruko (?–?): Japanese president of the Japanese branch of the American Association of University Women Tsuda Sen (1837–1908): Japanese male Christian educator and agriculturist who was the father of Tsuda Umeko and helped form the Tokyo WCTU Tsuda Umeko (1864–1929): Japanese educator who was one of five girl students on the government’s Iwakura Mission; she was educated in the United States and founded the Women’s English School (Joshi Eigaku Juku) in 1900 Tsuji Matsu (?–?): Japanese leader of the Japan Women’s Committee for International Relations (Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai) and member of the YWCAJ Wada (Kôra) Tomi (1896–1993): Japanese psychologist and pacifist who attended the 1921 WILPF Vienna Congress as an informal representative for the Osaka

Appendix A: Notable People  143

Women’s Congress and served as an interpreter for Jane Addams’s lectures in Osaka Weed, Ethel (1906–1975): American lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) who was assigned to the Women’s Information Office of the Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) at GHQ/SCAP ,

Wold, Emma (?–?): American chairperson of the Women’s Committee for World Disarmament Yajima Kajiko (1833–1925): Japanese Christian social reformer who was the first director of the Tokyo WCTU (renamed JWCTU), served as a delegate to International Disarmament Week in 1921, and submitted a peace petition with the signatures of ten thousand Japanese women to the Washington Disarmament Conference Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980): Japanese socialist, theorist, activist, and social critic Yamamoto Sugi (1902–1995): Japanese suffragist and physician who was a cofounder of the Japanese Women’s League for Birth Control (Nihon Sanjichôsetsu Fujin Dômei) in 1933 Yamanouchi Mina (1900–1990): Japanese factory worker who was one of the leaders of the Women’s Division of Yûaikai, a Christian labor organization Yamawaki Fusako (1867–1935): Japanese educator who assisted in the formation of the Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujinkai) Yosano Akiko (1878–1942): Japanese poet and writer who expressed her antiwar feelings through a poem in 1904 and was a member of the Bright Sunshine Society (Reijitsukai), a suffrage movement fund-raising group Yoshioka Yayoi (1867–1935): Japanese physician, suffragist, founder of Tokyo Women’s Medical School (Tokyo Joi Gakkô), and delegate to the 1928 Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu as president of the Japan Women’s Medical Association (Nihon Joikai)

Appendix B: Notable Organizations

Alliance for the Promotion of a Mother and Child Protection Act (Boshi Hogo Hô Seitei Sokushin Fujin Renmei, 母子保護法制定促進婦人連盟) Blue-stocking Society (Seitôsha, 青鞜社) Central League for the National Spiritual Mobilization (Kokumin Seishin Sôdôin Iinkai, 国民精神総動員委員会) Commoners’ Society (Heiminsha, 平民社) Federation of Japanese Women’s Organizations (Nihon Fujin Dantai Renmei, 日本婦人団体連盟): Translated in Japanese Women as League of Japanese Women’s Organizations Federation of Primary School Women’s Teachers’ Association (Zenkoku Shôgakkô Jokyôiinkai, 全国小学校女教員会) Greater Japan Federation of Women’s Associations (Dai Nihon Rengô Fujinkai, 大日本連合婦人会): Translated in Japanese Women as Federation of Great Japan Women’s Association Great Japan Press Association (Dai Nihon Genron Hôkokukai, 大日本言論報国会) International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace International Council of Women International Woman Suffrage Alliance International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship Japan Woman Suffrage Council (Nihon Fujin Sanseiken Kyôkai, 日本婦人参政権 協会) Japan Women’s Committee for International Relations (Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai, 国際連絡婦人委員会) Japan Women’s Medical Association (Nihon Joikai, 日本女医会) Japanese Birth Control League (Nihon Sanjichôsetsu Renmei, 日本産児調節連盟)

146  Appendix B: Notable Organizations

Japanese Women’s League for Birth Control (Nihon Sanjichôsetsu Fujin Dômei, 日本産児調節婦人同盟) Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union (Nihon Fujin Kirisutokyô Kyôfûkai, 日本婦人キリスト教矯風会) Joint Committee of Women’s Suffrage Groups (Fusen Dantai Rengô Iinkai, 婦選団体連合委員会) League of Women Voters National American Woman Suffrage Association National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War National Defense Women’s Association (Dai Nihon Kokubô Fujinkai, 大日本 国防婦人会): Translated in Japanese Women as Women’s National Defence Association National League for the Abolition of Licensed Prostitution (Zenkoku Kôshô Haishi Kisei Dômei, 全国公娼廃止期成同盟) National Woman’s Party National Women’s League (Zenkoku Fujin Dômei, 全国婦人同盟) New True Women Association (Shin Shin Fujinkai, 新真婦人会) New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai, 新婦人協会) Pan-Pacific Association of Osaka (Osaka Han Taiheiyô Kyôkai, 大阪汎太平洋協会) Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujinkai, 愛国婦人会): Translated in Japanese Women as Ladies Patriotic Society Proletarian Women’s Alliance (Musan Fujin Dômei, 無産婦人同盟) Red Wave Society (Sekirankai, 赤瀾会) Social Masses Women’s League (Shakai Taishû Fujin Dômei, 社会大衆婦人同盟) Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations (Tokyo Rengô Fujinkai, 東京連合婦人会) Woman’s Alliance for the Imperial City Administration (Tokyo Fujin Shisei Jôka Renmei 東京婦人市政浄化連盟): Translated in Japanese Women as Women’s Association for the Municipal Betterment of Tokyo Women’s Committee on Postwar Countermeasures (Sengo Taisaku Fujin Iinkai, 戦後対策婦人委員会) Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Women’s Peace Association in Japan (Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai, 婦人平和協会): The WPAJ women used several names, including the Women’s Peace Association in Japan, Women’s Peace Society of Japan, and the Woman’s Association in Japan for International Friendship. Why those women used several names is not known. Yet such different usages may indicate that the members of the WPAJ tried to balance national and gender priorities for the peace movement. Women’s Suffrage League (Fusen Kakutoku Dômei, 婦選獲得同盟): Translated in Japanese Women as the Woman’s Suffrage League Woman Suffrage Alliance (Fujin Sansei Dômei, 婦人参政同盟) Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan (Kirisutokyô Joshi Seinenkai, 日本キリスト教女子青年会)

Notes

introduction

1. This quotation is cited and translated in Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from “Seitō,” 1911–16 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 94. In Japanese mythology, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu (Ama-terasu ô mi kami) was supreme among numerous gods. This indicates that as in other ancient civilizations, including Greece and Egypt, Japanese people worshipped woman and regarded her as an independent agent. However, under the patriarchal sociofamilial structure in modern civilization, man exerted power over woman, and woman was subordinated and lost her independence. In the 1910s, not only in Japan but also in Europe and America, women like Hiratsuka were struggling to challenge and redefine gender roles. She wrote this as part of a manifesto inaugurating a ­women’s literal journal, Seitō, which carried both Western and Japanese writings and served as a forum for readers to discuss women’s issues. As Bardsley points out, the cover of the journal illustrated a royal woman of Greece or Egypt (2). Thus, Hiratsuka linked women’s causes in Japan with those in the rest of world, indicating that Seitôsha members were New Women and therefore part of what Bardsley called “an international phenomenon” (14). See also Tomida Hiroko, Hiratsuka Raichô and Early Japanese Feminism (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004). 2.  Throughout this book, Japanese names are written in accordance with the Japanese practice of giving the surname first and the given name second. Japanese women often applied a suffix, “ko,” indicating a woman, to their given names. Similarly, Gauntlett Tsune used both Tsune and Tsuneko, and Inoue Hideko also used Hide. 3.  The cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall, in “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart

148 Notes to the Introduction

Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), notes that the terms “West” and “western” have “no simple or single meaning” (185) and that “the West” is a discourse that divides the world into “the West and the Rest.” In this book, I follow Hall’s approach: “the West” was “central to the Enlightenment” (187) and “did first emerge in Western Europe” (185), and the United States belongs to the West (185). The discourse of the West assumed by Western society “was the most advanced type of society on earth” (187). For the history of modern Japan, see Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (London: Belknap Press, 2000), and Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For the history of feminism in Japan, see Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Empowerment and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983); and Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 4. Leila J. Rupp, “Constructing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888–1945,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1571–1600. See also Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 5. Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Tem­ perance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 6. Yasutake Rumi, Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004). Anglo-American missionaries visited Japan and promoted women’s education, which paved the way for the organization of the Tokyo WCTU (Tokyo Fujin Kyôfûkai) in 1886. The Tokyo WCTU developed into the Japanese WCTU in 1893. 7. Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire, 5. See also Kubushiro Ochimi, “Taishô ju-ichi-nen no taikaki o mukaen to shite” [General Conference in 1922 begins], Fujin Shinpô [Woman’s Herald], no. 293 (February 1922): 2. 8. Yasutake, Transnational Women’s Activism, 102; Tyrrell, Woman’s World/ Woman’s Empire, 4–5. Yasutake points out the collaboration of “Americanization” between American and Japanese unions. Tyrrell sketches the complex nature of union activism. Sakamoto Kiyone’s research about Miyakawa Shidzue, a colleague of Gauntlett Tsune, points out members of the Youth Department of the JWCTU, most of whom were educated in missionary schools, who absorbed the ideals of social reform and women’s rights based on Christianity and took an initiative to promote the women’s rights movement in the Meiji era. Sakamoto notes that those women hardly gained non-Christian people’s support to expand their activism widely because they promoted social reform and the women’s rights movement by adopting the methods of the WCTU without establishing Japanese styles in ways that would have gained public support. See Sakamoto Kiyone, “Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai Seinen Fuijnbu no katsudô” [Activism among the Youth Department of the Japanese WCTU: Focus on the student (sic) of Doshisha Girls’ School], Kirisutokyô Shakai Mondai Kenkyû [Study of Christianity and Social Problems], no. 51 (December 2002): 113–148.

Notes to the Introduction  149

9.  Joyce Zonana identifies two forms of opposition in analyzing the ideology of “feminist Orientalism”: racial, or “white/black,” opposition, and cultural, or “West/ East,” opposition. See Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 31 (1993): 593n2. For writing on a similar topic, see Yoshihara Mari, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 10.  African American women activists also used the discourse of civilization to “uplift” the African American population in American mainstream society. For writings on this topic, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Kevin K. Gaines, “The Woman and Labor Questions in Racial Uplift Ideology: Anna Julia Cooper’s Voices from the South,” in Uplifting The Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 128–151; and Gail Bederman, “‘The White Man’s Civilization on Trial’: Ida B. Wells, Representations of Lynching, and Northern Middle-Class Manhood,” in Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 45–76. 11.  Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4. 12. Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Anja Schüler, and Susan Strasser, eds. Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. 13.  By Japan’s modern patriarchy, I mean a system of Japanese society and the government controlled by men that was applied in the Meiji era. The Meiji government created the “family-state” (kazoku-kokka) system, in which the individual household was regarded as a microcosm of the nation-state. As all women were subordinate to family males at home, they were also objects of state control. Vera Mackie points out, “The potential for political repression existed in this system and this power was directed against women as much as any other groups in society.” See Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35. 14.  In this book, by “Japanese feminists,” I mean urban middle-class Japanese women reformers mainly living in Tokyo. 15.  Throughout this study, I follow M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s approach, in which they emphasize that third world feminism “provides a position from which to argue for a comparative, relational feminist praxis that is transnational in its response to and engagement with global process of colonization.” See M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction: Genealo­ gies, Legacies, Movements,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), xx. Books relevant to third world feminism and those that touch on issues of third world women in the world are plentiful. See Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/ Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and

150 Notes to the Introduction

Minoo Moallem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 349–363; Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 16.  See Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, and Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 17.  See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 213–214. Williams notes that internationalism (cooperation between nations) is not the opposite of nationalism (selfish pursuit of a nation’s interests as against others) in the context of a subordinate political group seeking its own distinct identity (214). 18. Yoshimi Kaneko, Fujin sanseiken [Women’s Suffrage] (Tokyo: Kajima Kenkyûjo, 1971), 141–165. 19.  Suzuki Yûko, Feminizumu to sensô: Fujin undôka no sensô kyôryoku [Wartime cooperation among women activists] (Tokyo: Marujusha, 1986); Barbara Molony, “Ichikawa Fusae and Japan’s Pre-war Women’s Suffrage Movement,” in Japanese Women: Emerging from Subservience, 1868–1945, ed. Hiroko Tomida and Gordon Daniels (Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2005), 58. Sugawara Kazuko similarly argues that Ichikawa overly adopted a “tactic” or “strategic” approach to the power to achieve women’s liberation, which allowed the government to exploit such women’s agency. See Sugawara Kazuko, Ichikawa Fusae to fujin sanseiken undô: Mosaku to kattô no seiji­ shi [Ichikawa Fusae and the women’s suffrage movement: A political history in searching and struggling] (Yokohama, Japan: Seori Shobô, 2002), 8. 20. Dee Ann Vavich, “The Japanese Woman’s Movement: Ichikawa Fusae, a Pioneer in Woman’s Suffrage,” Monumenta Nipponica 22, no. 3–4 (1967): 402–436. See also Yoshimi, Fujin sanseiken; Barbara Molony, “Women’s Rights, Feminism, and Suffragism in Japan, 1870–1925,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 4 (November 2000): 639–661; and Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986), 226–253. 21.  For an overview of intercultural communications, see Patricia Ward D’Itri, Cross Currents in the International Women’s Movement, 1848–1948 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999). For histories of the international feminist movement, see Kimberly Jensen and Erika Kuhlman, eds., Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective (St. Louis, MO: Republic of Letters, 2010); Rupp, “Constructing Internationalism”; and Rupp, Worlds of Women. Chapter 1

1.  Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 58. Civilization is used in this book according to Raymond Williams’s idea: “a specific combination of the ideas of a process and an achieved condition. It has behind it the general spirit of Enlightenment,

Notes to Chapter 1  151

with its emphasis on secular and progressive human self-development. Civilization expressed this sense of historical process, but also celebrated the associated sense of modernity: an achieved condition of refinement and order” (58; emphasis in original). 2.  For this perspective, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 285–327, 849–855. 3.  Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23–27. 4.  Imperialism is used in this book according to one of Raymond Williams’s definitions: “a sustained political campaign to equate imperialism with modern civilization and a ‘civilizing mission.’” See Williams, Keywords, 159. For an overview of how the civilization discourse operates and creates “others,” see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 1–2, 95, 246. 5.  Robert Bocock, “The Cultural Formations of Modern Society,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 175–181. 6. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 16–20. 7.  See Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 31 (1993): 592–617. Zonana cites Susan L. Meyer, “Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre,” Victorian Studies 33 (2): 247–268. For writing on a similar topic, see Yoshihara Mari, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 8.  For more on this topic, see Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Sneider argues the simultaneous expansion of the suffrage movement and American imperialism. African American women activists also used the discourse of civilization to “uplift” the African American population in American mainstream society. See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Kevin K. Gaines, “The Woman and Labor Questions in Racial Uplift Ideology: Anna Julia Cooper’s Voices from the South,” in Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 128–151; and Gail Bederman, “‘The White Man’s Civilization on Trial’: Ida B. Wells, Representations of Lynching, and Northern Middle-Class Manhood,” in Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 45–76. 9.  Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 7. 10. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 179. 11.  Gerd Callesen, “The International Socialist Women’s Conference,” Sources on the Development of the Socialist International (1907–1919), 2006, available at http://

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library.fes.de/si-online/frauen-intro-en.html. Nancy Cott points out the development of parallel international feminist movements by both middle- and working-class feminists in the early twentieth century. See Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 25. 12.  Kumari Jayawardena notes, “The countries [of the East] . . . have one factor in common: they have either been directly subjected to aggression and domination by imperialist powers interested in establishing themselves in the region, or indirectly manipulated into serving the interests of imperialism.” See Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986), 1. See also Robert J. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 360–382. 13.  Ishimoto Shidzue, Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935; repr., Tokyo: Ôzorasha, 1997), 66. 14.  The movement began with demands for parliamentary government in 1874. The historian Irokawa Daikichi notes that the movement took on the aspect of a bottom-up cultural revolution. See Irokawa Daikichi, Jiyû minken [Freedom and people’s rights] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981), 9–51. 15. Vera Mackie refers to the impact of the movement for women. See Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 26. 16. Ibid., 12; Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 29–30; Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from “Seitō,” 1911–16 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007), 12; Chino Yôichi, Kindai fujin kyôikushi: Taisei nai fujin dantai no keisei katei o chûshin ni [The history of women’s education in modern Japan: The process of forming women’s organizations under government control] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1979), 20. 17. Chino, Kindai fujin kyôikushi, 22. 18.  Ibid., 23–30. 19.  Yamakawa Kikue, “Woman in Modern Japan,” Shakai-shugi Kenkyû [Studies on Socialism] 6, no. 2 (September 1922): 2, Mary Ritter Beard Papers, Box 2, File 22, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. 20. Chino, Kindai fujin kyôikushi, 29. 21.  For more on the Shôkôgakusha, see ibid. Regarding the Ôsaka Incident, see Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 4. In the Ôsaka Incident, 139 liberal activists, who supported the independence movement in Korea, were arrested and accused of treason. For more on this issue and Fukuda, see Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 2, 150–151. 22.  See Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (London: Belknap Press, 2000), 371–413. 23. For a detailed discussion of Confucianism in the Meiji era, see Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 28–29. 24.  Ibid., 31. 25. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 361; Chino, Kindai fujin kyôikushi, 13–14. The school, named Tokyo Jogakkô (Tokyo Girls’ School) was established in 1871 and closed in 1877. See “Girls’ Education in the Early Meiji,” Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan, available at http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/ hakusho/html/others/detail/1317595.htm (accessed on March 1, 2013).

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26. Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Empowerment and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26; Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 12; Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy towards Women, 1890–1910,” in Recreating Japanese Women: 1600–1945, edited by Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 152. A leading officer and politician in the Meiji government, Kuroda Kiyotaka realized during his travels to America and Europe in 1871 that women’s education was crucial to remaking Japan as a civilized nation. He proposed to send five girls to America to have them receive a good education. Kuroda, “Kaitakushi kengi sho” [Proposal by the officer for land development], in The Papers of Tsuda Umeko, edited by Nakajima Fumio (Tokyo: Tsudajuku College, 1980), pp. 81–103. The Iwakura Mission was composed of government students and envoys to the United States and Europe in 1871. In addition to acquiring Western knowledge, the mission started negotiating for the revision of unfair trade treaties concluded with Western states during the Edo era. For the history of the Iwakura Mission, see Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 355–361. Meiji-era archives can be found in National Diet Library, Modern Japan in Archives, available at http://www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/index.html. For a record of the Iwakura Mission, see National Diet Library, “Iwakura Mission,” Modern Japan in Archives, available at http://www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/cha1/description07.html (accessed on March 1, 2013). 27. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, 26. 28.  Nolte and Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy towards Women,” 155–156; Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 26–53. 29. Chino, Kindai fujin kyôikushi, 104–105. 30. Takamure Itsue, Josei no rekishi II [The history of women II], vol. 5 of Takamure Itsue Zenshû [The complete works of Takamure Itsue] (Tokyo: Rironsha, 1966), 553. 31. Chino, Kindai fujin kyôikushi, 105. 32. Takamure, Josei no rekishi II, 79–83 (translated in Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 39). 33. Kathleen S. Uno, “Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor,” in Bernstein, Recreating Japanese Women, 38; Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 39. 34.  Gail Lee Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Bernstein, Recreating Japanese Women, 10. 35.  E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 36.  For this topic, see Fukaya Masashi, Ryôsai kenbo shugi no kyôiku [Education based on the notion of Good wife and Wise mother] (Nagoya, Japan: Reimei Shobô, 1981), and Kodama Katsuko, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi [Short history of the woman’s suffrage movement] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1981), 19. 37. The Dajôkan Futatsu of 1868 was known as “baiyaku no sewa mata wa datai no toriatsukai” (peddling medicine or aborting babies). See Fujime Yuki, Sei no re­ kishigaku: Kôshô seido, Dataizai taisei kara Baishun Bôshi Hô/Yûsei Hogo Hô taisei e [A historiography of sexuality: From the licensed prostitution system and the criminalization of abortion to the Prostitute Prevention Law and the Eugenics Protection Law] (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1999), 6, 119–123. 38.  Japan’s criminal abortion law was modeled on European laws. The abortion policy was motivated in part to increase national strength and security by increasing

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the population. See Tiana Norgren, Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 23–24. 39.  See Fujime, Sei no rekishigaku, 89–115; Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 13; Elizabeth Dorn Lubin, Reforming Japan: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 102–111; and Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 88–114. 40. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, 21–24. 41. Chino, Kindai fujin kyôikushi, 104–140. For writings on the history of the Patriotic Women’s Association, see Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, 30–32; Itô Yasuko, “Aikoku Fujinkai to josei no shakai katsudô” [The Patriotic Women’s Association and women’s social activism], in Gunkoku no onna tachi [Women in a militaristic state], ed. Hayakawa Noriyo (Tokyo: Yoshikawakôbun Kan, 2004), 75–93; Hayakawa Noriyo, Kindai tennôsei to kokumin kokka: Ryôsei kankei o jiku to shite [The Modern Emperor System and the nation-state: From the perspective of the relations between the sexes] (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2005); and Ueno Chizuko, Nashionarizumu to jendâ [Nationalism and gender] (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998). 42.  Nolte and Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy towards Women,” 153; Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 10. 43.  In 1872, the Meiji government lifted the ban on Christianity. However, in the 1880s, in line with the increasingly nationalistic sociopolitical climate, the government oppressed Christian schools. Accordingly, many were forced to close. For further information, see Frances Benton Clapp, The Life of Miss Denton, ed. and trans. Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts (Kyoto, Japan: Doshisha, 2007), 61–62. 44. Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 4. 45.  See Jennifer Robertson, “The Shingaku Woman: Straight from the Heart,” in Bernstein, Recreating Japanese Women, 91–92. 46. Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 6. 47. Chino, Kindai fujin kyôikushi, 15. 48.  Yunomae Tomoko points out that the foundation of the Tokyo WCTU was supported by the number of graduates of mission schools. See Yunomae Tomoko, “Joseishi ni okeru YWCA: Kirisutokyô josei dantai no naka de” [YWCA in w ­ omen’s history: Within Christian women’s organizations], in Kirisutokyô joseishi kenkyû [Research on the history of Christian women], ed. Kirisutokyô Joseishi Kenkyûkai (Tokyo: Kirisutokyô Joseishi Kenkyûkai, 1997), 21–27. For writing on Christian women and warfare, see Tomisaka Kirisutokyô Sentâ, ed., Josei Kirisutosha to sensô [Church women and warfare] (Ôtsu, Japan: Kohro-sha, 2002). 49. Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai, ed., Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai hyakunenshi [A one-hundred-year history of the Japanese WCTU] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1986), 35. 50.  Ibid., 62–90. Meiji Girls’ School (Meiji Jogakkô) was founded in 1885 and closed in 1909. 51. “Bankoku Fujin Heiwakai” [International Women’s Peace Conference], Fujin Shinpô, no. 26 (June 1899): 30–32. Unfortunately, the formal English name of “the International Women’s Peace Conference” is not known from this article. Ute

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Kätzel’s research shows that Margarethe Lenore Selenka planned to mobilize bourgeois women to participate in the “first worldwide Women’s Peace Demonstration” of 1899. Selenka was able to “arouse considerable support among women and women’s organizations from many countries” including the United States and Japan. See Ute Kätzel, “A Radical Women’s Rights and Peace Activist: Margarethe Lenore Selenka, Initiator of the First Worldwide Women’s Peace Demonstration in 1899,” Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 51. 52.  Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai, Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai hyaku­ nenshi, 38, 52. For more on the JWCTU, see Yasutake Rumi, Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), and Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, Reforming Japan: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010). Lublin argues that the members of the JWCTU developed three identities, including “as Japanese, as Christians, and as women,” and that these identities were intertwined and constructed a single identity to promote the social reform in Japan (4). 53.  For more on the JWCTU and the antiprostitution movement, see Kurahashi Katsuto, “‘Karayuki’ to Fujin Kyôfûkai (1): Kyûshû ichi chiiki no shikaku kara” [“Karayuki” and the Japanese Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1): From a regional viewpoint of women’s history in Kyûshû], Kirisutokyô Shakai Mondai Kenkyû [Study of Christianity and Social Problems], no. 51 (December 2002): 1–62, and Kurahashi Katsuto, “‘Karayuki’ to Fujin Kyôfûkai (2),” Kirisutokyô Shakai Mondai Kenkyû, no. 52 (December 2003): 82–138. 54. Yamanouchi Mina, Yamanouchi Mina jiden: Jûni sai no bôseki jokô kara no shôgai [Autobiography of Yamanouchi Mina: My life since I was a twelve-year-old spinner] (Tokyo: Shinjuku Shobô, 1975), 39–40. Yamanouchi became a member of the Executive Committee of the Dai Nihon Rôdô Sôdômei-Yûaikai (Greater Japan General Federation of Labour-Friendly Society). See Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 109. Yamanouchi is also dealt with in Tsurumi, Factory Girls, 133, 145. The Yûaikai was founded by Suzuki Bunji, a Christian social reformer, in a Unitarian church basement in Tokyo in 1912. See Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 33, and Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 86. 55.  Yamanouchi Mina, Yamanouchi Mina jiden, 39–40. Like other industrialized states, Japan saw the emergence of new women—urban, middle-class young women, who vigorously joined the discussion about the redefinition of women’s roles in society. For writings on new women in Japan, see Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan; Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Laurel Rasplica Rodd, “Yosano Akiko and the Taishô Debate over the ‘New Woman,’” in Bernstein, Recreating Japanese Women, 175–198; and Dina Lowy, The Japanese “New Woman”: Images of Gender and Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 56.  Ichikawa Fusae, Ichikawa Fusae jiden: Senzen hen [Autobiography of Ichikawa Fusae: The prewar period] (Tokyo: Shinjuku Shobô, 1974), 28–29, 45. 57. For more on Christian social activism, see John Crump, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); Doi Akio, Nihon

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Purotesutanto Kirisutokyôshi [A History of Protestantism in Japan] (Tokyo: Shinkyô Shuppansha, 1980); Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); and Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan, 25. 58. National Committee, YWCA, “Present Status and Main Problems of Japanese Women,” Japanese Women 1, no. 6 (November 1938): 3. 59. Ibid. 60.  Tsuda Umeko, “Japanese Women and the War,” Woman’s Department, June 1895, in The Papers of Tsuda Umeko, 63–64. 61.  For details, see “Bankoku Fujin Heiwakai,” 30–32. 62. Gauntlett Tsune, Shichijû-shichi nen no omoide [My seventy-seven years’ memoir] (1949; repr., Tokyo: Ôzorasha, 1989), 79. 63. Doi, Nihon Purotesutanto Kirisutokyôshi, 36–120. 64.  Secretary of the Tokyo Christian Women’s Union, “Tokyo Fujin Kyôfûkai Shuisho” [Purposes of the Tokyo WCTU], Jogaku Zasshi, no. 65 (May 1887): inside rear cover, cited in Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai, Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai hyakunenshi, 50–51. 65.  Gauntlett (Yamada) Tsune (1873–1953), who married a teacher of English, Edward L. Gauntlett, in 1898, was a peace activist, a suffragist, and one of the leading activists for the JWCTU. Gauntlett is discussed more in Chapters 3 and 5. For more on Gauntlett and her involvement in the suffrage movement of the 1920s, see Matsukura Mariko, “Mô hitori no fujin undôka: Gauntlett Tsuneko (1920 nen­ dai ni okeru)” [Another suffragist: Tsuneko Gauntlett in the women’s movement in the 1920s], Kirisutokyô Shakai Mondai Kenkyû [Study of Christianity and Social Problems], no. 51 (December 2002): 85–112. 66.  For the history of the Social Gospel, see Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 2–3, and George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 90–93. 67.  Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, eds., Gender and the Social Gospel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 26. 68.  Nakajima Kuni notes that the government created restrictive gender laws and educational policy to eliminate the influence of women’s educational policies promoted by Christian schools; see Nakajima Kuni and Sugimori Nagako, eds., Nijû seiki ni okeru josei no heiwa undô: Fujin Kokusai Heiwa Jiyû Renmei to Nihon no josei [The women’s peace movement in the twentieth century: WILPF and Japanese women] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 2006), 15. 69. National Committee, YWCA, “Present Status and Main Problems of Japanese Women,” 3. 70. Ibid. 71.  The notion of women’s rights included equality between the sexes, woman suffrage, the practice of monogamy, and the rejection of keeping mistresses. These ideas were introduced via a journal, Meiroku zasshi, in 1874. Mori Arinori, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and some other liberal male leaders organized the Meirokusha (Meiji Six Society) to promote Westernization and civilization in Japan. See Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 24–26; Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 16–25; Miyake Yoshiko, “Doubling

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Expectations: Motherhood and Women’s Factory Work Under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Bernstein, Recreating Japanese Women, 19n; and Kaneko Sachiko, Kindai Nihon joseiron no fukei [The genealogy of women’s issues in modern Japan] (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1999), 23–43. In this context, the notion of women’s rights itself was new, yet it was an upper- and middle-class-centered discourse that would not branch out to encompass the interest of women in other classes. Along with the Freedom and People’s Rights movement, several women, including Kusunose Kita (1836–1920) and Kishida Toshiko (1864–1901) promoted women’s rights. See Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 29–48, and Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 28. 72.  For the history of women socialists, see Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, and Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 114–138. 73.  Miyakawa Torao, “‘Sekai Fujin’ kaisetsu” [Commentary on Women of the World], in Sekai Fujin fukkokuban [Reprint of Women of the World] (Tokyo: Ryûkei Shosha, 1981), 17–18. For Fukuda Hideko, see Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 2–12; Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 114–138; Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 29–50; and Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan, 37–45. 74.  Fukuda Hideko, “Hakkan no ji” [Editor’s address], Sekai Fujin [Women of the World], January 1, 1907, p. 1. 75.  See the strapline in, for example, Sekai Fujin, March 15, 1907, p. 1. 76.  This subheading can be seen, for example, in Sekai Fujin, June 15, 1907, p. 1. 77.  For example, see “Eikoku fujin no senkyo undô” [The suffrage movement promoted by British women], Sekai Fujin, January 1, 1907, p. 3. 78. Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 122. 79. The Heiminsha, which promoted the socialist movement, was formed by Sakai Toshihiko, a socialist; Kôtoku Shûsui, an anarchist; and Uchimura Kanzô, a Christian reformer, in 1903. A number of women, including Fukuda Hideko, Kanno Sugako, Itô Noe, and Nishikawa (Matsuoka) Fumiko, joined the Heiminsha. As the Meiji government strengthened its oppression against socialists in 1910 following the Great Treason Incident (Taigyaku jiken), this first political campaign initiated by socialist women was forced to change its platform. The Great Treason Incident eventually led to the execution of twelve people, including Kôtoku Shûsui and Kanno Sugako. On the history of women in the Heiminsha, see Nishikawa Fumiko, Heiminsha no Onna: Nishikawa Fumiko jiden [Commoners’ Society: the autobiography of Nishikawa Fumiko], ed. Amano Shigeru (Tokyo: Aoyama Kan, 1984); Kondô (Sakai) Magara, Chichi Sakai Toshihiko to dôjidai no hitobito [My father, Sakai Toshihiko, and his contemporaries], vol. 1 of Watashi no kaisô [Memoirs] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1981); Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 43–69; and Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, 18–20, 51–74. 80. Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan, 30–31. 81.  Historians point out the influence of Christianity on the socialist movement in Japan. For example, Sheldon Garon notes that Christians predominated among “pioneer socialists” and “bourgeois radicals and humanitarians” before 1900. See Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan, 25. Hane points out, “Many socialists and communists got their start as social critics and many reformers as Christians.” See Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, 491; and Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 145. The

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fact that socialists were constantly persecuted by the government while Christians, who were largely from the upper middle class and chose to support government policies, were not made it difficult to promote a broad-based radical movement to find solutions for social issues in Japan. On the issue of Christianity and social reformers, see Crump, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan, and Doi, Nihon Purotesutanto Kirisutokyôshi. Tsuda, “Japanese Women and the War,” 63–64. 82. Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 10. 83. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 495. 84.  Ibid., 494. Chapter 2

1.  “Looking from West to East: Thoughts about Japan and Her Women,” Jus Suffragii 14, no. 8 (May–June 1920): 121–122. 2. “Eighth Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Geneva, June 6 to 12, 1920 Resolution Adopted,” Jus Suffragii 14, no. 9 (July 1920): 149. 3.  For writing on the history of the peace and women’s rights movements in the United States, see Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993). 4.  “Looking from West to East,” 122. 5.  Regarding the definition of the phrase “Japanese feminists,” see note 13 in the Introduction. 6. “The Chinese Banner,” Jus Suffragii 8, no. 9 (May 1914): 103; Carrie Chapman Catt, “Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?” Jus Suffragii 8, no. 9 (May 1914): 98; “International Manifesto of Women,” Jus Suffragii 8, no. 13 (September 1914): 159; Marilyn Fischer and Judy D. Whipps, eds., Addams’s Essays and Speeches on Peace, vol. 4 of Jane Addams’s Writings on Peace (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 78. 7.  Nakajima Kuni, ed., Kindai fujin mondai meicho senshû zokuhen [A sequel of masterpieces on modern women’s issues] (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center, 1982), 6. 8.  Joseishi Sôgô Kenkyûkai, ed., Nihon josei seikatsushi dai 4kan [The life history of women in Japan] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1990), 165. 9.  Ibid., 189. 10. Letter from the Executive Committee of WILPF to “Sisters and Fellowworkers in China,” March 19, 1927, Jane Addams Papers, edited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI, 1984, Reel 18, Frame 1411. 11. Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo Edo to the Earthquake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4–5. 12. Moriya Azuma, “Teito fukkô to Tokyo Rengô Fujinkai” [Reconstruction of Tokyo and the Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations], Fujo Shimbun, December 23, 1923, p. 4. 13.  Mary Ritter Beard, “The New Japanese Women,” Woman Citizen, January 12, 1924, p. 29. 14.  Ibid. See also Ide Fumiko and Esashi Akiko, Taishô Democracy to josei [The Taishô Democracy and women] (Tokyo: Gôdô Shuppan, 1977), 261. Ide and Esashi

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write that the Women’s Suffrage League was organized out of the Tokyo Rengo Fujinkai. See also Kodama Katsuko and Matsuo Takayoshi, “Josei Dômei” kaisetsu sômokuji sakuin [A guide to the Women’s League, whole table of contents and index] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1985), 62. 15.  Itô Nakako, “Fusen undô no jintô ni tatsu hitobito” [Leaders of the woman’s suffrage movement], Fusen [Woman’s Suffrage] 1, no. 5 (June 1927): 6. 16.  For relevant history, see Mineke Bosch and Annemarie Kloosterman, eds., Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902– 1942 (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1985). 17.  Catt, “Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?” 98. 18.  Carrie Chapman Catt, “Diaries 1911–23,” Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt, Library of Congress Photoduplication Service, Washington, DC, 1978, Reel 1. 19.  “Editorial Notes,” Jus Suffragii 7, no. 10 (July 1913): 2. 20. Ibid. 21. In Jus Suffragii, the phrase “the woman movement” is commonly used instead of “the women’s movement.” 22.  “The Chinese Banner,” 103. 23.  “Women’s Victory in America: Two New States for Suffrage,” Jus Suffragii 9, no. 3 (December 1914): 199. 24.  Catt, “Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?” 98. 25.  Ibid. (emphasis in original). 26.  Oda Olberg, “Woman’s Suffrage and Division of Labor,” Jus Suffragii 8, no. 9 (May 1914): 102. 27.  Catt, “Diaries 1911–23,” Reel 2. 28.  Joshi Eigaku Juku was founded in 1900 and renamed Tsuda Eigakujuku in 1933, Tsudajuku Senmon Gakkô in 1943, and Tsudajuku Daigaku in 1948. 29.  Annie Furuhjelm, “Our Alliance,” Jus Suffragii 8, no. 9 (May 1914): 99. 30.  “Editorial Notes,” 2. 31.  Catt, “Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?” 98. 32.  Millicent Garrett Fawcett, “Message to the I.W.S.A.,” Jus Suffragii 8, no. 13 (September 1914): 159. 33. “International Manifesto of Women,” Jus Suffragii 8, no. 13 (September 1914): 159. 34.  Mary Ritter Beard, “Mothercraft,” Woman Voter 2, no. 159 (January 1912): 12–13 (emphasis in original). 35.  The twenty-six countries were Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bohemia, Bul­ garia, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Galicia, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Ser­ via, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. 36.  For the relevant history, see Bosch and Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship. 37.  Fawcett noted, “At the I.W.S.A., ordinary international Suffrage work being for the time suspended, Headquarters Committee have undertaken to extend help of various kinds to the large mummers of foreign women left stranded and in some cases penniless and friendless in London in consequence of the war.” Fawcett, “Message to the I.W.S.A.,” 159. 38. Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 123–141; Bosch and Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship, 141.

160 Notes to Chapter 2

39.  Bosch and Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship, 136. 40.  Upon organizing the committee, board members of the committee sent letters to women in the world and asked them to support the committee. See letter from Chrystal Macmillan to Tsuda Umeko, October 16, 1915, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Records (DG 043), Reel 133.79, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA. 41.  Mary Sheepshanks, “Peace,” Jus Suffragii 13, no. 3 (December 1918): 25. 42. Ibid. 43.  “The Eighth Congress of the I.W.S.A.,” Jus Suffragii 14, no. 9 (July 1920): 146–147. 44.  “Congress Week,” Jus Suffragii 14, no. 8 (May–June 1920): 114, 116–117. 45.  “The Eighth Congress of the I.W.S.A.,” 146–147. 46.  Ibid. For writings on the IWSA congress in 1920, see Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 23, and Bosch and Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship, 175–178. 47.  There are numerous books about Tsuda Umeko. For recent books, see Barbara Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education in Japan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); and Iino Masako, Kameda Kinuko, and Takahashi Hiroko, eds., Tsuda Umeko o sasaeta hitobito [People who supported Tsuda Umeko] (Tokyo: Yûhikaku, 2009). As for Hatoyama, see Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 109–110. 48.  “Nihon no fujin ni senkyoken wa hayai” [No immediate necessity for ­woman’s suffrage in Japan], Yomiuri Shimbun, February 26, 1911, p. 3. 49.  “Neko fujin no ashi ato: Sareru Beikoku no joketsu” [Mrs. Catt’s footprints: The departure of the American Amazon], Yomiuri Shimbun, October 22, 1912, p. 3. The Taishô era refers to the period from 1912 to 1926. 50. Shimoda Utako, “The Virtues of Japanese Womanhood,” in Japan to America: A Symposium of Papers by Political Leaders and Representative Citizens of Japan on Conditions in Japan and on the Relations between Japan and the United States, ed. Masaoka Naoichi (New York: Putnam, 1915), 188. 51.  Ibid., 189. 52.  Mary Ritter Beard, The Force of Women in Japanese History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1953), 142. 53.  Ibid. Examples showing the friendships between Beard and Japanese women include the following: Inoue Hideko and the Women’s Peace Association invited Beard to a tea party in 1922, and Shimoda presented Beard with a high-quality kimono as a present in 1923. See “Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai no ocha no kai” [Women’s Peace Association held a tea party], Yomiuri Shimbun, November 29, 1922, p. 4, and “Furisode no Biâdo hakase fujin” [Mrs. Dr. Beard was clad in a long-sleeve kimono], Yomiuri Shimbun, November 15, 1923, p. 5. Beard reported to Jane Addams, who was coming to Japan in June 1923, that Atomi Kakei “is the oldest and most conservative” and that “she is a marvelous person to see and it would be an experience for you to visit her school (Atomi Girls’ School).” See letter from Mary Beard to Jane Addams, June [6], 1923, Jane Addams Papers, Reel 15.

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54.  Tsuda Umeko, “The Presentation of the Gospel in Japan,” The Student World, July 1913, in The Papers of Tsuda Umeko, ed. Nakajima Fumio (Tokyo: Tsudajuku College, 1980), 502. 55.  Tsuda Umeko, “The Education of Japanese Women,” in The Papers of Tsuda Umeko, 22. 56. For similar topic and discussion, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Frantz Fanon’s argument on “dependency complex of colonized people” provides insight for gender oppression. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 83–108. 57.  Tsuda, “The Education of Japanese Women,” 32. 58.  Tsuda, “The Presentation of the Gospel in Japan,” 500. 59.  Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from “Seitō,” 1911–16 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007), 3, 259. 60.  Hiratsuka Raichô left the Blue-stocking Society in 1915. Hiratsuka, Ichikawa Fusae, and Oku Mumeo jointly organized their second women’s group, the New Woman’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai) in 1919 and published Women’s Alliance (Josei Dômei). The members of the association promoted political campaigns to liberate women from restrictions imposed legally and within the family structure. For writing on this topic, see Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan; Tomida Hiroko, Hiratsuka Raichô and Early Japanese Feminism (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004); Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 122–130; Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy towards Women, 1890–1910,” in Recreating Japanese Women: 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 151–174; and Laurel Rasplica Rodd, “Yosano Akiko and the Taishô Debate over the ‘New Woman,’” in Bernstein, Recreating Japanese Women, 175–198. 61. The journal was subtitled in English, “The First Magazine of Woman’s Movement in Japan.” As this subtitle shows, the purpose of the New True Women Association was to promote the women’s rights movement in Japan. For further information about the New True Women Association, see Nishikawa Fumiko, Heiminsha no Onna: Nishikawa Fumiko jiden [Commoners’ Society: The autobiography of Nishikawa Fumiko], ed. Amano Shigeru (Tokyo: Aoyama Kan, 1984). 62.  Tsuda Umeko, “With the Alumnae Japanese Women of the Present Day,” Bryn Mawr Alumnae Quarterly, April 1915, in The Papers of Tsuda Umeko, 503. 63.  On the popularity of Seitō, Jan Bardsley writes that more than three thousand letters requesting subscriptions, membership, and advice about personal problems came in to Seitō from all over Japan. See Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan, 1–3. 64.  In fact, such factional alliances were developed on specific issues later on. 65.  Beard, “The New Japanese Women,” 10. 66.  Hiratsuka left Seitôsha in 1915 because of her private problems. Anarchist Itô Noe, a member of Seitôsha, took over the Seitō journal. However, as a result of private problems, Itô gave up the journal in 1916. 67.  Kodama Katsuko, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi [Short history of the woman’s suffrage movement] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1981), 35–79. For the New Women’s Association, see Orii Minako and Josei no Rekishi Kenkyûkai, eds., Shin Fujin Kyôkai

162 Notes to Chapter 2

no Kenkyû [Studies about the New Women’s Association] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 2006). 68.  “Joshi kyôikuka wa fujin sanseiken o nanto miruka” [How do women educators see women’s suffrage?], Josei Dômei, no. 1 (October 1920): 22; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Does Woman Need to Receive Alimony?” [Onna wa arimoni o torubekiya], Josei Dômei, no. 7 (April 1921): 8–13. 69.  Ichikawa Fusae, Ichikawa Fusae jiden: Senzen hen [Autobiography of Ichikawa Fusae: The prewar period] (Tokyo: Shunjuku Shobô, 1974), 96. 70. Gauntlett Tsune, “Fodder for Thought,” Japanese Women 3, no. 4 (July 1940): 1. 71.  For example, “Otoko no kuni to onna no kuni” [Men’s state and women’s state], Yomiuri Shimbun, November 26, 1911, p. 2. 72. Gauntlett Tsune, Shichijû-shichi nen no omoide [My seventy-seven years’ memoir] (1949; repr., Tokyo: Ôzorasha, 1979), 113–117. 73.  Gauntlett, “Fodder for Thought,” 1. 74.  “Kongo wa Kyôfûkai ga Nihon no fujin sansei undô ni chûshin to natte katsudô suru” [From now on, the JWCTU will take the initiative to promote woman suffrage in Japan], Yomiuri Shimbun, July 23, 1921, p. 4. For discussion about Gauntlett’s decision to promote the suffrage movement in 1920, see Shibahara Taeko, “Not Only for the Welfare of the Nation but for the World and Humanity,” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 64–65. 75.  For more on the membership of the New Women’s Association, see Orii and Josei, Shin Fujin Kyôkai no Kenkyû, 28. For more on the membership of the JWCTU in 1922, see Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai, ed., Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai hyakunenshi [A one-hundred-year history of the Japanese WCTU] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1986), 414. 76.  “Ga fujin ga Bankoku Fujin Sanseiken Taikai ni shusseki seru wa Nihon o daihyô shiteka Kyôfûkai o daihyô shiteka no hinan ni taishi ni fujin no benmei” [Did Mrs. Gauntlett represent Japan or the JWCTU: Two JWCTU women defended their action], Yomiuri Shimbun, April 11, 1921, p. 4. 77. Ibid. 78.  Kondô (Sakai) Magara, Sekirankai to watashi [The Red Wave Society and myself], vol. 2 of Watashi no kaisô [Memoirs] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1981), 16–18. 79. Esashi Akiko, Sameyo onnatachi: Sekirankai no hitobito [Awake women: People of the Red Wave Society] (Tokyo: Ôtsuki Shoten, 1980), 39–40. Other writings on the Red Wave Society are Orii and Josei, Shin Fujin Kyôkai no Kenkyû, 186–189, and Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 102–105. 80.  For the Red Wave Society, see Esashi, Sameyo onnatachi. 81.  For more on this topic, see Thomas W. Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008). 82. Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (London: Belknap Press, 2000), 508. 83.  Ishimoto Shidzue, Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935; repr., Tokyo: Ôzorasha, 1997), 223.

Notes to Chapter 2  163

84.  Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 40–41, 68–72. 85. In his letter, Kawakami referred to the Red Wave Society and the New Women’s Association as examples of newly established women’s organizations. See letter from Kawakami Isamu to Emily Balch, May 3, 1921, WILPF Records, Reel 133.79. Kawakami reported on the situation and progress of the women’s peace movement in Japan to WILPF until the Women’s Peace Association in Japan was founded in 1921. See Chapter 2. 86.  In the 1910s, socialist women of the Heiminsha, including Fukuda Hideko; Nishikawa (née Matsuoka) Fumiko; Endo (Iwano) Kiyoko; and Sakai (née Nobeoka) Tameko, Sakai Magara’s stepmother, had already promoted the campaign to repeal Article 5, but their campaigns were unsuccessful. See Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 62–66, and Esashi, Sameyo onnatachi, 32–33. Mackie points out that the New Women’s Association gained Endo’s advice in order to promote the repeal of Article 5. See Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Empowerment and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 58. 87.  Yamakawa Kikue, “Woman in Modern Japan,” Shakai-shugi Kenkyû [Studies on Socialism] 6, no. 2 (September 1922): 3, Mary Ritter Beard Papers, Box 2, Folder 22. 88.  Yamanouchi Mina, “Fujin rôdôsha no tachiba yori,” [Working woman’s perspectives], in Yamanouchi Mina, Yamanouchi Mina jiden: Jûni sai no bôseki jokô kara no shôgai [Autobiography of Yamanouchi Mina: My life since I was twelve years old spinner] (Tokyo: Shinjuku Shobô, 1975), 99. 89. Orii and Josei, Shin Fujin Kyôkai no Kenkyû, 186–189; Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 102–105. 90.  For the activities of the JWCTU and the earthquake, see “Kanto Daishinsai to sonogo no katsudô” [The Great Kanto Earthquake and social activism after the earthquake], in Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai, Nihon Kirisutokyô Fujin Kyôfûkai hyakunenshi, 423–424. 91. Kondô, Chichi Sakai Toshihiko to dôjidai no hitobito, 70. 92.  Beard, “The New Japanese Women,” 10. The Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations was organized on September 28, 1923. 93.  Ibid., 10, 28–29; Moriya, “Teito fukkô to Tokyo Rengô Fujinkai,” 4–5. 94.  “Kokumin ni tou: Kôshô no zenpai ni tsuite” [Put a question to the people: In regard to the abolition of licensed prostitution], Fujo Shimbun, November 18, 1923, p. 11; “Fujinkai no san chôryû: Sanseiken kakutoku—shakai jigyô—shokug­ yô mondai mo toriireta fujin undô” [Three main streams in women’s communities: The women’s movement that links issues of suffrage, social reform, and labor], Fujo Shimbun, November 18, 1923, p. 10. 95.  “Kokumin ni tou,” 11. The Japanese wording used in this article is “kono seido no sonchi ni yotte go-man no shimai wa kokuhô no moto ni doreiseikatsu o kyôyôserare sono chi to niku towa donran nishite zankokuna doreibaibaigyôsha o kosu kate to natte orimasu.” 96.  “Kokumin ni tou: Kôshô no zenpai ni tsuite,” Fujo Shimbun, November 18, 1923, p. 11. 97. Ibid.

164 Notes to Chapter 2

98.  Ibid. (emphasis in original). 99.  Beard, “The New Japanese Women,” 10. 100.  “Gotô-san ga omachikane no Biâdo hakase ga kita” [Dr. Beard, for whom Mrs. Gotô was waiting, has arrived], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, September 15, 1922, p. 2; Mary Ritter Beard, The Making of Charles A. Beard: An Interpretation (New York: Exposition Press, 1955), 24–26; Nancy F. Cott, A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard through Her Letters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 25–26. 101.  “Shin Tokyo no tame ni tsukusubeku Biâdo hakase kitaru” [To help Tokyo rebuild: Dr. Beard comes to Tokyo], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, October 7, 1923, p. 3. 102. “Josei no taisaku: Biâdo fujin kara Rengôkai e ikensho” [Measures for women: Mrs. Beard provides suggestions to the TFWO], Yomiuri Shimbun, October 17, 1923, p. 3; “Nihon fujin no katsudô o homechigiru Bihakase fujin” [Mrs.  Dr.  Beard greatly praises Japanese women’s activities], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, October 30, 1923, p. 2. 103.  “Nihon fujin no katsudô o homechigiru Bihakase fujin,” 2. 104.  Mary Ritter Beard, “Beikoku fujin no totta michi o Nihon fujin ga ima tôtteiru: keiken o tsukutte sekai e mochidase” [Japanese women are following the same path as American women took: make and share your own experience with the rest of the world], Yomiuri Shimbun, November 4, 1923, p. 4. 105.  Beard, “The New Japanese Women,” 29. 106. Mary Ritter Beard, “What Work Is the Most Important for Japanese Women at This Time?” Fujin Kôron [Women’s Review] 8, no. 12 (November 1923): 60–61. 107.  The core groups of the suffrage league were, in addition to the JWCTU’s, the Japan Woman Suffrage Council and the Woman Suffrage Alliance (Fujin Sansei Dômei), organized by the former members of the New Women’s Association. For further information, see Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi. Yajima Kajiko, Tsuda Umeko, Yamakawa Kikue, and Sakai Magara also became members of the league; see Ichikawa, Ichikawa Fusae jiden, 146. 108. Women’s Suffrage League, “Sengensho” [Manifesto], in Josei wa seiji to dô mukiatte kita ka: Kenshô fujin sanseiken undô [How have women tackled politics: Studies for the women’s suffrage movement], by Itô Yasuko, Shindô Kumiko, and Sugawara Kazuko (Tokyo: Ichikawa Fusae Kinenkai Shuppanbu, 2005), 102; Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi, 146. 109. Ichikawa, Ichikawa Fusae jiden, 146–162. 110.  Itô Nakako, “Fusen undô no jintô ni tatsu hitobito,” 6. 111. Sharon H. Nolte, “Women’s Rights and Society’s Needs: Japan’s 1931 Suffrage Bill,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 4 (December 1986): 692; Sugawara Kazuko, Ichikawa Fusae to fujin sanseiken undô: Mosaku to kattô no seijishi [Ichikawa Fusae and the women’s suffrage movement: A political history in searching and struggling] (Yokohama, Japan: Seori Shobô, 2002), 13. 112. Sugawara, Ichikawa Fusae to fujin sanseiken undô, 98–105. 113. Ichikawa, Ichikawa Fusae jiden, 118. 114.  Ibid., 157–158. 115. Ichikawa Fusae, “Kokusai Fujin Sansei Kyôkai ni tsuite” [On the Inter­ national Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship], Fusen 1, no. 5 (June 1927): 6.

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116. Letter from Corbett Ashby to Hamaguchi Osachi, September 30, 1929, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô [Collection on the suffrage and women’s movements] (microfilmed), Ichikawa Fusae Kinenkai (Fusae Ichikawa Memorial Association), Nihon Tosho Center, Tokyo, 2005, Reel 51. 117.  Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai, “Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai dai 9-kai reikai hôkoku,” [The report of the 9th regular meeting of the Japan Women’s Committee for International Relations], January 30, 1930, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô (microfilmed), Reel 51. 118. “Kikon fujin no kokuseki mondai” [Married women’s nationality issue], Fusen 5, no. 6 (June 1931): 30. 119.  Letter from Fowko to Doris Stevens, April 25, 1929, Doris Stevens Papers, 1884–1983, MC 546, 73-8, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 120. Gauntlett, Shichijû-shichi nen no omoide, 61–63. 121.  Kokusai, “Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai dai 9-kai reikai hôkoku,” Reel 51. 122.  Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen, “Introduction,” in Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement 1920–1940, ed. Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 11. 123. Ichikawa, Ichikawa Fusae jiden, 122. 124. J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971), 119. 125.  Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 5. 126.  This issue is discussed in Chapter 5. 127.  “Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 1928,” Bulletin of the Pan-Pacific Union, no. 102 (July 1928): 5–6. For writings on the PPWC, see Yasutake Rumi, “The First Wave of International Women’s Movements from a Japanese Perspective: Western Outreach and Japanese Women Activists during the Interwar Years,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 (2009): 13–20; Sugimori Nagako, Amerika no josei heiwa undô shi: 1898–1931 [A history of the American women’s peace movement: 1898–1931] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1996), 165–230; Fiona Paisley, “Culture and Internationalism in Australian Feminism’s Pacific Age,” Journal of Women’s History 14 (Autumn 2002): 105–132; and Shibahara Taeko, “‘The Private League of Nations’: The Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference and Japanese Feminists in 1928,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 41 (2011): 3–24. The Pan-Pacific Conferences were held in 1930 and 1934 in Honolulu, and in 1937 in Vancouver during the 1930s. The Pan-Pacific Women’s Association, a permanent organization of the PPWC (renamed the PanPacific and South-East Asia Women’s Association in 1955), was formed in the 1930 PPWC. For more on the Pan-Pacific and South-East Asia Women’s Association, see “About PPSEAWA,” PPSEAWA International, available at http://www.ppseawa.org/ about-ppseawa (accessed on March 1, 2013). 128.  Ann Y. Satterthwaite, “The Third Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference,” MidPacific Magazine 47, no. 4 (1934): 303–304. 129.  “Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 1928,” 5. 130.  Yasutake, “The First Wave of International Women’s Movements,” 16. 131.  Akami Tomoko, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–45 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 36.

166 Notes to Chapter 2

132.  Yasutake, “The First Wave of International Women’s Movements,” 16. 133.  Hoshino Aiko, “Taiheiyô Kaigi ichimon ittô” [Q&A about the IPR], Fusen 3, no. 12 (December 1929): 17–20. 134.  “Pacific Peace, Dr. Ford’s Theme: Director of Union in Honolulu Talks in Tokio of Wide Longing for It,” New York Times, June 19, 1927. 135. “See Steps to Peace in Pacific Session,” New York Times, July 30, 1927, p. 13. 136.  “Pacific Peace, Dr. Ford’s Theme,” New York Times, June 19, 1927. 137.  Jane Addams, “Presidential Address,” in Women of the Pacific: Being a Record of the Proceedings of the First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference Which Was Held in Honolulu from the 9th to the 19th of August 1928, under the Auspices of the Pan-Pacific Union (Honolulu: Pan-Pacific Union, 1928), 14. 138. Sugimori, Amerika no josei heiwa undô shi, 196. 139.  Paisley, “Culture and Internationalism,” 106–107. Paisley writes that it was “Japan and China and the relations between them that caused most international concern in these decades. From the turn of the century, Japan had steadily increased its regional power through trade, territorial acquisitions, and treaty agreements. . . . Meanwhile, China was also emerging as a world power; its nationalist government, declared in 1928, aimed to shift diplomacy in the region and utilize international support against Japan. Whether for reasons of containing Japanese military aggression in the region or for the rights of Japanese women and of those living under Japanese rule, international feminism’s interest in women from Japan at this crucial time in world history clearly encompassed more than women’s rights alone” (106–107). 140.  For example, Inoue Hideko, who studied at Teachers’ College at Columbia University in New York City and was professor of Japan Women’s University and chairperson of the WPAJ, attended a peace conference in Washington in 1921. Gauntlett Tsune, a leader of the JWCTU and the WPAJ, attended congresses of the WCTU and the IWSA as early as 1920. 141.  Kiuchi Kyô, Kyôiku ichiro: Han Taiheiyô Fujin Kaigi ni resshite [Education is the cause: Participating in the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference] (Tokyo: Ôzorasha, 1989), 56; “Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference,” Bulletin of the Pan-Pacific Union, no. 103 (August 1928): 12–13. 142. “Zenkoku Fujin Dômei no Han Taiheiyô Fujinkaigi hantai seimeisho” [Opposition to the PPWC by the National Women’s League], July 18, 1928, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô [Collection of the suffrage and women’s movements] (unfilmed), Ichikawa Fusae Kinennkai (Fusae Ichikawa Memorial Association), Nihon Tosho Center, Tokyo. 143. Ichikawa Fusae, “Han Taiheiyô Fujinkaigi ni tsuite” [Re Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference], Fujin Kôron, no. 155 (July 1928): 33. 144.  Inoue Hideko, “Hyôjun seikatsu” [Standard of living], Rengô Fujin, no. 2 (August 1928): 10, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô (microfilmed), Reel 42. 145. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 150. 146. Yasutake, Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 53. 147.  “Traffic in Women and Children—An International Problem: Round Table Discussion, Leader: Mrs. T. E. Taylor, New Zealand,” in Women of the Pacific, 265–267.

Notes to Chapter 3  167

148.  Gauntlett Tsune, “Anti-Vice Movement in Japan: (An Examination of the Position of Japan in Relation to the League of Nations Treaty),” in Women of the Pacific, 241–244. 149.  Katrina Leppänen, “International Reorganisation and Traffic in Women: Venues of Vulnerability and Resistance,” Lychnos, 2006, p. 116, available at http:// www.idehist.uu.se/vethist/lychnos/articles/2006-58.pdf. 150.  Helen J. Self, “League of Nations,” in Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, ed. Melissa Hope Ditmore (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 1:248–249. 151.  The league also raised the age of legal protection from eighteen to twenty-one. To regulate “White Slave Traffic,” two international agreements were signed in 1904 and 1910. For this issue, see Leppänen, “International Reorganisation and Traffic in Women.” Leppänen notes that the league published Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East in 1932, and with the 1927 report, these two inquiries were “ambitious enquiries to gather information from all parts of the world, the first mainly dealing with the ‘west’ and the second with the ‘east.’” See Leppänen, “International Reorganisation and Traffic in Women,” 117. The historical record on the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children is available online. See “Fujin jidô baibai mondai dai ni kan (B-2-4-2-29-00-002),” Ref. B06150830900, Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, available at http://www.jacar.go.jp/DAS/meta/ image_B06150830900?IS_KIND=SimpleSummary&IS_KEY_S1=B06150830 900&IS_STYLE=default&IS_TAG_S1=InfoD& (accessed Nov­e­mber 7, 2013). 152.  “Traffic in Women and Children,” 267. 153.  Letter from Eleanor M. Hinder to Rachel E. Crowdy, August 21, 1928, Jane Addams Papers, Reel 20. 154.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Kaigi no shôrai narabi ni kansô” [Prospect of the conference and its future], Fusen 3, no. 1 (January 1929): 5. 155.  The Japanese government did not accept the League of Nations investigation until 1931. See “Haishô mondai zadankai,” Fusen 5, no. 6 (June 1931): 10–11. The Prostitution Prevention Law was enacted in 1956. 156.  “Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai Kiyaku,” Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô, Reel 51. Yasutake points out that the idea to create such an international organization came from “the Atlantic through the transnational YWCA network.” See Yasutake, “The First Wave of International Women’s Movements,” 17. 157.  Letter from Ichikawa Fusae to Lady Aberdeen, April 30, 1930, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô (microfilmed), Reel 51. 158.  Moriya, “Teito fukkô to Tokyo Rengô Fujinkai,” 4. 159. Ibid. 160.  Beard, “The New Japanese Women,” 10. 161.  Ibid., 28. 162. Frances Parkinson Keyes, “From the Land of the Rising Sun,” Good Housekeeping 82, no. 2 (January 1926): 139. Chapter 3

1.  Baty was legal advisor to the Japanese Foreign Ministry and one of the nonJapanese people in Japan who was asked by WILPF to support an emerging women’s peace movement association.

168 Notes to Chapter 3

2.  Mary Ritter Beard, “Women and War Service,” The Suffragist, February 24, 1917, p. 7. 3. “WILPF Resolutions: 1st Congress, the Hague, Netherlands, 1915,” p. 4, ­available at http://www.wilpfinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/WILPF _triennial_congress_1915.pdf. 4.  For the peace movement, see Linda Schott, Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom before World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), and Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993). 5.  See “WILPF Resolutions: 1st Congress, the Hague, Netherlands, 1915,” 1. 6.  The majority of the WPAJ chose Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai (Women’s Peace Asso­ ciation) as its formal name. See “Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai hakkaishiki (Kanda Hitotsu­ bashi Josui-kan nite)” [The opening ceremony of the Women’s Peace Association (Joshui-kan hall, Hitotsubashi Kanda, Tokyo)], Katei Shûhô [Home Weekly], May 13, 1921, p. 1. 7.  WILPF sent letters to Japanese women leaders as well as Mary Elkinton Nitobe in 1915 and asked them to organize a peace group. See letter from Emily Hobhouse, acting secretary of the ICWPP, to Tsuda Umeko, October 13, 1915, Women’s Interna­ tional League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Records, Reel 133.79, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA, and letter from Chrystal Macmillan, sec­ retary of the ICWPP, to Tsuda Umeko, October 16, 1915, WILPF Records. 8. Letter from Inoue Hideko to Emily G. Balch, January 10, 1924, WILPF Records. 9.  Letter from Mary Elkinton Nitobe to Jôdai Tano, January 31, 1921, WILPF Records. 10. “Constitution of the Woman’s Association in Japan for International Friendship,” ca. May 1921, WILPF Records. 11.  Letter from Inoue Hideko to Madeline Z. Doty, January 15, 1927, WILPF Records. 12.  “WILPF Resolutions: 1st Congress, the Hague, Netherlands, 1915,” 3. 13.  See Marilyn Fischer and Judy D. Whipps, eds., Addams’s Essays and Speeches on Peace, vol. 4 of Jane Addams’s Writings on Peace (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 78. 14.  Jane Addams, “A Review of Bread Rations and Women’s Traditions,” in Peace and Bread in Time of War, vol. 3 of Jane Addams’s Writings on Peace, ed. Marilyn Fischer and Judy D. Whipps (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 48–49. 15. Jane Addams, “President Address,” Report of the International Congress of Women: The Hague—The Netherlands, April 28th to May 1st, 1915 (Chicago: Woman’s Peace Party, 1915), 6. 16.  Naruse Jinzô (1858–1919) studied in the United States and founded Japan Women’s University in 1901. He promoted peace education among his students. For further information, see Nakajima Kuni, “Josei no heiwa undô eno shokuhatsu: Naruse Jinzô no heiwa shisô to katsudô” [To boost women’s peace activism: The peace thought and peace activism of Naruse Jinzô], in Nijû seiki ni okeru josei no heiwa undô: Fujin Kokusai Heiwa Jiyû Renmei to Nihon no josei [The women’s peace movement

Notes to Chapter 3  169

in the twentieth century: WILPF and Japanese women], ed. Nakajima Kuni and Sugimori Nagako (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 2006), 13–36. 17.  The ICWPP sent a similar letter to a male peace activist, Tomiyama K. of the Japan Peace Association, prior to making contact with Tsuda. Unfortunately, as far as available primary sources are concerned, we cannot further identify Tomiyama K. This was probably Tomiyama Setsuzô, a leading member of the Japan Peace Association. Correspondences between the ICWPP and the Japan Peace Association continued via Kawakami Isamu until the WPAJ was established. Kawakami Isamu reported the process of organizing the WPAJ to ICWPP and WILPF. 18.  Letter from Chrystal Macmillan to Tsuda Umeko, February 17, 1916, WILPF Records. 19.  Aletta Jacobs (1854–1929) was the vice chairperson of the ICWPP and a suffragist who visited Japan with Carrie Chapman Catt for the suffrage cause in 1912. Jacobs and Catt met Tsuda Umeko, Hatoyama Haruko, and Yamawaki Fusako in 1912 in Japan. Tsuda also nominated these two educators. 20. Letter from Tsuda Umeko and Mary Elkinton Nitobe to Aletta Jacobs, December 13, 1915, WILPF Records. 21. Ibid. 22. Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (London: Belknap Press, 2000), 495. 23.  Tsuda Umeko, “Japanese Women and the War,” Woman’s Department, June 1895, in The Papers of Tsuda Umeko, ed. Nakajima Fumio (Tokyo: Tsudajuku College, 1980), 60. 24.  For more on the notion of “good wife and wise mother,” see Chapter 1. 25.  Tsuda, “Japanese Women and the War,” 61. 26.  Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 18–19; Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59–60; Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Empowerment and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31. 27. Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, 32. 28. Tsuda Umeko, “Miss Tsuda’s Address to the Graduating Class,” Alumnae Report of the Joshi-Eigaku-Juku, no. 17 (July 1916), in The Papers of Tsuda Umeko, 155. 29. Letter from Kawakami Isamu, general secretary of the Japan Peace Society, to Aletta Jacobs, November 21, 1917, WILPF Records. WILPF records indicate that members of WILPF sent letters to Western people and missionaries in Japan, including Thomas Baty and Mary Denton, WCTU missionary and professor of Doshisha Women’s College, and asked them to support an emerging women’s peace movement in Japan. 30. “Sekai no fujin ni renmei suru fujin heiwa kyôkai ga Nihon ni hokki sareta kinô daihyô fujin no kai” [To join a peace league in the world, a Women’s Peace Association was proposed by women leaders yesterday], Yomiuri Shimbun, December 2, 1920, p. 4; “Heiwa o mokuhyô ni: Mezameta josei no doryoku” [Peace is the object: Awakened women’s efforts], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, May 4, 1921, p. 5. 31. Oshio Kazuto, “Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai e mukete: Nitobe Fusai to Naruse Jinzô” [Toward the formation of the Women’s Peace Association in Japan: Mr. and

170 Notes to Chapter 3

Mrs. Nitobe Inazô and Naruse Jinzô], in Nakajima and Sugimori, Nijû seiki ni okeru josei no heiwa undô, 37–62. Naruse Jinzô was a devoted Christian missionary and educator who studied in the United States. However, not simply adopting Western thoughts and ideology, he wanted to establish a women’s university that was suitable for contemporary Japan’s sociocultural circumstances. Thus he founded Japan Women’s University in Tokyo in 1900. For his biography, see Nakajima Kuni, Naruse Jinzô, ed. Hirano Kunio (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kôbunkan, 2002). Naruse started the Concordia movement in 1912, which was designed to spiritually unite all people from different backgrounds, including culture, religion, creed, and ethnicity. The movement pursued the way to promote international harmony, understanding, and peace. See “Japan a Leader,” Ohinemuri Gazette, January 13, 1913, p. 2, available at http:// paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=OG19130113.2.5&cl=&srpos= 0&e=-------10--1----0--&st=1. 32.  Sugimori Nagako points out that there were some male supporting members in the WPAJ, yet the WPAJ leaders exclusively managed the association. See Sugimori Nagako, “Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai no kessei to katsudô no tenkai” [The Women’s Peace Association and its formation and the development of activism], in Nakajima and Sugimori, Nijû seiki ni okeru josei no heiwa undô, 63–85. 33.  “Heiwa o mokuhyô ni: Mezameta josei no doryoku” [Peace is the object: Awakened women’s efforts], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, May 4, 1921, p. 5. 34.  Letter from Kawakami Isamu to Emily Balch, December 15, 1920, WILPF Records. 35. Letter from Emily Balch to Kawakami Isamu, January 27, 1921, WILPF Records. 36.  Letter from Kawakami Isamu to Emily Balch, May 3, 1921, WILPF Records. For further information about the Red Wave Society, see Chapter 1. 37.  Letter from Jôdai Tano to Emily Balch, May 10, 1922, WILPF Records. See also letter from Kawakami to Balch, December 15, 1920. 38.  Letter from Inoue to Doty, January 15, 1927. 39. “WILPF Resolutions: 3rd Congress, Vienna, Austria, July 10–17, 1921,” available at http://www.wilpfinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/WILPF _triennial_congress_1921.pdf; letter from Emily Balch to Jôdai Tano, September 12, 1921, WILPF Records. 40.  Enclosure in anonymous letter to David J. Evans, October 5, 1921, WILPF Records. The sender of the letter wrote, “Miss Jane Addams has asked me to send you the enclosed.” 41. Letter from Emma Wold to Inoue Hideko, August 6, 1921, Katei Shûhô, October 21, 1921, p. 3. 42. “Japan Accepts Hughes Agenda: Cabinet Agrees, in Principle, with the Suggestions Offered by Secretary,” New York Times, October 2, 1921, p. 3. 43.  Moriya Azuma, “Heiwa no tabi ni shitagôte” [Attended on a peace pilgrimage], Fujin Shinpô [Woman’s Herald], no. 293 (February 1922): 12–21. The New York Times highlighted Yajima in its article, describing her as a peace messenger from Japanese women. 44.  “Beikokumin ni uttaeru: Heiwa no sankajô” [Appeal to the U.S. citizens: Three clauses for the peace], Yomiuri Shimbun, October 21, 1921, p. 4.

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45.  “Message of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom to the women of Japan,” 1924, WILPF Records (emphasis in original). 46.  Moriya, “Heiwa no tabi ni shitagôte,” 20. 47. Jôdai Tano, “Jikyoku gukan” [Thoughts on the current situation], Fujin Shinpô, no. 289 (October 1921): 13. 48.  “Sekai ichi no onna: Mataruru A-jô” [The best woman in the world: Miss Addams awaited], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, June 14, 1923, p. 2; “‘Heiwa no haha’ Adamusu joshi no kôen: 23-nichi gogo Chuô Kôkaidô [“Mother of Peace,” Miss Addams gave a public lecture at the central public hall on the 23rd in the afternoon],” Osaka Asahi Shimbun, June 23, 1923, p. 11. 49.  Letter from Jôdai Tano to Emily Balch, January 17, 1923, WILPF Records. 50. Letter from Wada Tomi to Jane Addams, April 22, 1923, Jane Addams Papers, edited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI, 1984, Reel 15, Frame 758. Wada attended the 1921 WILPF Vienna Congress as an informal representative for the Osaka Women’s Congress. 51.  Both Wada and Inoue wrote that Addams’s visit created a strong desire for peace among Japanese people. In particular, Inoue noted that Addams’s visit led the WPAJ to affiliate with WILPF. See letter from Wada Tomi to the WILPF, July 17, 1923, WILPF Records, and letter from Inoue to Balch, January 10, 1924. Regarding Jane Addams’s visit to Japan and her influence on the WPAJ, see Sugimori Nagako, “Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai no kessei to katsudô no tenkai,” 71–74. Sugimori argues that there is a close affinity between pacifism and feminism. 52. Jôdai Tano, “Japan of Yesterday and Today,” PAX International 1, no. 11 (October 1926), Pax International, 1925–1950, Reel 104.8, Collections of Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. 53.  “Sangoku fujindan no seigan ikensho” [Petitions and proposals presented by women’s organizations from three nations], Fujin Shinpô, no. 386 (May 1930): 46–47. 54. The New York Times featured this event in “Women of 5 Lands Voice Peace Pledge,” New York Times, January 24, 1930, p. 3. 55.  Letter from Ann Zueblin to Jôdai Tano, March 25, 1930, WILPF Records. 56.  Immigration Act of 1924, available at http://www.washington.edu/uwired/ outreach/cspn/Website/Classroom%20Materials/Curriculum%20Packets/Asian%20 Americans/Documents/2.html. To explore American sociopolitical and cultural conditions of the era and Japanese immigrants, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 81–127. 57. Gauntlett Tsune, “Washington ni okeru fujin no koe” [Women’s voices in Washington], Fujin Shinpô, no. 386 (May 1930): 42. See also Gauntlett Tsune, Shichijû-shichi nen no omoide [My seventy-seven years’ memoir] (1949; repr., Tokyo: Ôzorasha, 1989), 137. 58.  Kubushiro Ochimi, “Gauntlett, Hayashi, ryô fukukaitô o okuru” [To see off two vice presidents: Gauntlett and Hayashi], Fujin Shinpô, no. 381 (December 1929): 16. 59.  Gauntlett Tsune, “Heigu Heiwakyû kara” [From Hague Peace Palace], Fujin Shinpô, no. 386 (May 1930): 36. 60.  Gauntlett Tsune wrote “as an individual person.” See letter from Gauntlett Tsune to the Japan Women’s Committee for International Relations [Kokusai Renraku

172 Notes to Chapter 3

Fujin Iinkai], November [24], 1929, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô [Collection of the suffrage and women’s movements] (microfilmed), Ichikawa Fusae Kinennkai (Fusae Ichikawa Memorial Association), Nihon Tosho Center, Tokyo, 2005, Reel 51. 61.  Letter from Jôdai Tano to Mary Sheepshanks, July 17, 1928, WILPF Records. 62. Letter from Jôdai Tano to Mary Sheepshanks, International Secretary, January 25, 1930, WILPF Records. 63. Letter from Jôdai Tano to Dorothy Detzer, February 17, 1932, WILPF Records, United States Section, 1919–1959, Series C, Box 11, Folder 19. For the history on the Manchurian Incident and the war in China, see Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 576–624. 64.  “An Appeal of Women of Japan,” March 1932, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Papers, 1915–1978, Microfilming Corporation of America, Sanford, NC, 1983, Reel 79, Frame 1949. 65. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, 100. 66. “A Woman of the WPAJ to Friends in China,” March 1932, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Papers, 1915–1978, Reel 79, Frames 1945–1948; letter from the WPAJ to the YWCA, WCTU, Women’s National Council, and Women’s Suffrage League China, March 16, 1932, WILPF Records, United States Section, 1919–1959, Series C, Box 11, Folder 19. 67.  Letter from Jôdai to Detzer, February 17, 1932. 68.  Letter from Jôdai Tano to Camille Drevet, November 17, 1931, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Papers, 1915–1978, Reel 79, Frame 1940. 69. Letter from Gauntlett Tsune to WILPF, November 21, 1935, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Papers, 1915–1978, Reel 79, Frames 1986–1987. 70.  Tashiro Tsugi, “The World Is One Great Family,” Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Papers, 1915–1978, Reel 79, Frame 1992. The song was selected by Yosano Akiko, translated by J. Owen Gauntlett (son of Gauntlett Tsune), and composed by Yamada Kôsaku (brother of Gauntlett Tsune). 71.  Letter from Jôdai to Detzer, February 17, 1932. 72. Gauntlett, Shichijû-shichi nen no omoide, 158. 73.  Letter from Ishimoto Shidzue to Dorothy Hamilton Brush (Dick), January 25, 1941, Margaret Sanger Papers (unfilmed), Box 27, Folder 1, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. 74. Hayashi Uta, “Gunshuku kaigi kara kaette” [My sentiment about the Disarmament Congress], Yomiuri Shimbun, May 1, 1930, p. 5. 75.  Letter from Inoue to Balch, January 10, 1924. Chapter 4

1. Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 190–203. Two books about Margaret Sanger are widely read; they are David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), and Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). For her autobiography,

Notes to Chapter 4  173

see Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938; repr., New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999). 2. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, in The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective, ed. Michael W. Perry (Seattle, WA: Inkling Books, 2001), 221. 3. Gordon, The Moral Property of Women, 196 (emphasis in original). 4. Chesler, Woman of Valor, 15. 5.  For an overview of the discourse of birth control in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Japan, see Ogino Miho, Kazokukeikaku e no michi: Kindai Nihon no seishoku o meguru seiji [The way to family planning: Reproduction politics in modern Japan] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008), 16–25. For more on Ishimoto Shidzue and her advocacy of the birth control movement, see Helen M. Hopper, A New Woman of Japan: A Political Biography of Kato Shidzue (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Elise K. Tipton, “Ishimoto Shidzue: The Margaret Sanger of Japan,” Women’s History Review 6, no. 3 (1997): 337–355; Malia Sedgewick Johnson, “Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in Japan, 1921–1955,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii, 1987); and Mary Ritter Beard, The Force of Women in Japanese History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1953), 167–173. To explore the birth control movement in Japan, I gained inspiration from Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Moreover, Michel Foucault’s assertion that “at the juncture of the ‘body’ and the ‘population,’ sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death” was critical inspiration for me to explore the discourse of the birth control movement in Japan. See Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1978), 135–136. 6.  Ishimoto Shidzue, Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935; repr., Tokyo: Ôzorasha, 1997), 12. For her family background, see Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 3–12. 7.  Ibid., 41–56. 8.  Ibid., 90–97. 9.  Ibid., 147. 10. Hopper, A New Woman of Japan, 14. 11. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 156. 12.  Ibid., 158. 13.  Ibid., 350. 14.  Ibid., 163. 15.  For more on the ie system and the Meiji government’s policies on women, see Chapter 1. 16. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 183. 17.  Ibid., 183. 18.  Katô (Ishimoto) Shidzue, Aru josei seijika no hansei [One politician’s past life] (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyûsho, 1981), 64–65. 19. Kaji Tokijirô, “Sanji seigen undô no genjô to jikkô mondai” [The birth control movement, status quo and its practice], in Nihon sanji chôsetsu hyaku-nen shi [Centennial history of birth control in Japan], by Ôta Tenrei (Tokyo: Shuppan Kagaku Sôgô Kenkyûsho, 1976), 140–143. 20. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 232.

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21.  “Sangâ-fujin no raichô o ki ni shite Nihon nimo sanji seigen no seishin o senden suru Ishimoto dan-fujin” [Baroness Ishimoto propagates principles of birth control by taking advantage of Mrs. Sanger’s visit to Japan], Yomiuri Shimbun, February 6, 1922, p. 4. 22. Ishimoto Shidzue, “Tokyo-shi no atarashiki kokoromi to sanji seigen no ABC” [Tokyo-city launches a new political measure and an ABC of birth control], Fusen [Woman’s Suffrage] 3, no. 12 (December 1929): 12–16. 23. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 232. 24. Ibid. 25.  “Tokyo-shi no tasan seigen: Hôhô wa shingichû” [Implementation of birth control is under discussion in Tokyo-city], Fusen 3, no. 11 (November 1929): 35–36; “Sanchô sôdan ni arawareta shinkoku na sesô” [Counseling for birth control reflects serious social conditions], Sanji Chôsetsu Nyûsu [Birth Control Newspaper], May 5, 1934. 26.  Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcasts: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 262–263. 27. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 234. 28.  Ibid., 235. 29.  Ibid., 349–350. 30.  Ibid., 350–351. 31.  Ôta Tenrei, Nihon sanji chôsetsu hyaku-nen shi [Centennial history of birth control in Japan] (Tokyo: Shuppan Kagaku Sôgô Kenkyûsho, 1976), 94. 32.  Yamakawa Kikue, “1922 nen no naigai fujinkai” [The situation of women in Japan and the world in 1922], Kaihô [Emancipation] 4 (December 1922): 174 (author’s translation). 33. Ibid. 34. For Ishimoto Shidzue and eugenics, see Fujime Yuki, Sei no rekishigaku: Kôshô seido, Dataizai taisei kara Baishun Bôshi Hô/Yûsei Hogo Hô taisei [A historiography of sexuality: From the licensed prostitution system and the criminalization of abortion to the Prostitute Prevention Law and the Eugenics Protection Law] (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1999), 23. 35. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 299. 36.  Ibid., 358. 37.  Ibid., 77. 38.  Ibid., 242–245. 39.  Ibid., 241. 40.  Ibid., 162. 41.  Ibid., 281. 42.  Ibid., 282. 43.  Mildred Adams, “A Japanese Feminist,” Woman Citizen, January 10, 1925, p. 9. 44. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 282. 45.  Ibid., 243. 46.  Ibid., 273. 47. Ibid. 48.  Ishimoto’s photo was captioned as “Suffragist: Most Active in the ‘new women movement’ in Japan is Baroness Ishimoto” (Clearfield [PA] Progress, December  16,

Notes to Chapter 4  175

1924, p. 2) and as “Leader of the Japanese Women Intellectuals: Baroness Ishimoto, Who Is Coming to the United States to Study the Condition of Women in This Country” (New York Times, May 4, 1924, p. RPA 1). 49. “Suffragist,” Clearfield (PA) Progress, December 10, 1924, p. 2. 50. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 261–262. 51.  Ibid., 262. 52. Ibid. 53.  Carrie Chapman Catt gave Ishimoto her book, Woman Suffrage and Politics, with this message. See Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 262. As historians like Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen point out, American social feminists, including Carrie Chapman Catt, did not cross race lines within the United States. However, as Ishimoto’s experience indicates, these feminists promoted feminism internationally. Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen, “Introduction,” in Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920–1940, ed. Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 3–18. 54.  “Madam Control,” Time, September 2, 1935, p. 55. 55.  “Baron Ishimoto on Immigration Ban: Son of Former War Minister Hopes for a New ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement,’” New York Times, June 6, 1924, p. 9. 56.  Ibid., 29. 57.  Shibahara Taeko, “‘The Private League of Nations’: The Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference and Japanese Feminists in 1928,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 41 (2011): 3–24. 58.  “Women’s Progress in Japan,” Equal Rights 7 (August 1925): 198. 59. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 261–263. 60.  Ibid., 355. 61.  Ibid., 353–354. 62.  Ibid., 356; Katsuko Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi [Short history of the woman’s suffrage movement] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1981), 152. 63. Ôta, Nihon sanji chôsetsu hyaku-nen shi, 345. 64. Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi, 245. 65.  For more on the Fifth National Suffrage Congress, see Chapter 5. 66.  Ishimoto, “Tokyo-shi no atarashiki kokoromi to sanji seigen no ABC.” 67. Ôta, Nihon sanji chôsetsu hyaku-nen shi, 175–181. 68. Frühstück, Colonizing Sex, 116. 69. Ishimoto Shidzue, “Beikoku no sanjichôsetsu o mite” [Observation of American birth control methods], Yomiuri Shinbun, August 23, 1933, p. 9. 70.  Ishimoto jointly created the Japanese Birth Control League (Nihon Sanjichôsetsu Renmei) with both men and women birth control advocates, including Hiratsuka Raichô, Kawasaki Natsu, Yamamoto Sugi, Dr. Majima Yutaka, and Abe Isoo in 1931. The league was disbanded in 1932. This is perhaps because the league suffered from internal dissent; as Ishimoto wrote in 1934, “due to organizational faults, the League was dysfunctional.” “Nyûsu hakkô no aisatsu,” [Salutations for publishing Nyûsu], Sanji Chôsetsu Nyûsu, May 5, 1934, p. 1, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô [Collection of the suffrage and ­women’s movements] (unfilmed), Ref. 2421:1161, Ichikawa Fusae Kinenkai (Fusae Ichikawa Memorial Association), Tokyo. See also Ôta, Nihon sanji chôsetsu hyaku-nen shi, 145, and Hopper, A New Woman of Japan, 42–42, 55–57.

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71. Ôta, Nihon sanji chôsetsu hyaku-nen shi, 350. 72.  “Sanji chôsetsu kurinikku’ towa nanika? Kurinikku mondô” [What is a birth control clinic: Q and A about clinics], Sanji Chôsetsu Nyûsu, May 5, 1934, p. 4, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô (unfilmed). 73.  Letter from Ishimoto Shidzue to Miss Kaufman, January 10, 1935, Margaret Sanger Papers (microfilmed), Box 31, File 8, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. 74. Ibid. 75.  Katô (Ishimoto) Shidzue, Aru josei seijika no hansei, 64. 76.  “Forced Motherhood Deplored by Women’s Congress Speaker,” Sheboygan Press, July 18, 1933, 6. 77.  “Japan’s Problem,” Mansfield (OH) News-Journal, July 28, 1933, p. 6. 78. Frühstück, Colonizing Sex, 128. 79.  “Feminist Sees Japan Periled by Feudalism,” Lima News, February 2, 1937, p. 9. 80.  Frances Parkinson Keyes, “The Command Is ‘Forward,’” Good Housekeeping 97, no. 4 (October 1933): 33. 81.  For example, in this congress, Mary Beard stated, “It [a manifesto to the study of the Immigration Law Committee] proclaims the widening horizon of women’s interest, from the purely personal to the inclusive social.” See Keyes, “The Command Is ‘Forward,’” 170, and “Women; Fight Social System, Not Men, at Chicago Congress,” Newsweek at Home, July 29, 1933, p. 10. As Ishimoto’s participation in and contribution to the congress was effective and memorable, members of the “Our Common Cause, Civilization” assembly sent appeals for Ishimoto’s release from prison when she was arrested in 1937. See Mary Ritter Beard, The Force of Woman in Japanese History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1953), 172. 82.  Letter from Ishimoto to Kaufman, January 10, 1935. 83.  Because Baron Ishimoto’s family had to observe the aristocratic family tradition, the process of divorce was complicated. First she had to gain the support of two male members of her family; second, she had to ask the Agency of the Imperial Household to permit the couple to divorce. Then, after gaining papers of permission, she had to show the papers to the civil office to have it grant the divorce. See Hopper, A New Woman of Japan, 150. 84.  Mary Ritter Beard, The Force of Woman in Japanese History, 171. For details of Ishimoto’s arrest and imprisonment, see Hopper, A New Woman of Japan, 100–114, and Katô (Ishimoto) Shidzue, Saiai no hito Kanjû e: Diary of Katô Shidzue [To my dearly beloved Kanjû], ed. Funahashi Kuniko (Tokyo: Shin-yo-sha, 1988). The Peace Preservation Law, which gave police powers to do a survey of people’s thought and actions, was enacted together with the Manhood Suffrage Act of 1925. 85. Letter from Ishimoto Shidzue to Florence Rose, July 5, 1938, Margaret Sanger Papers, Reel 19. 86.  See Tiana Norgren, Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 140–145. 87.  In 4:11 of the Outlines of Fixed Population Policies (Jinkô Seisaku Kakuritsu Yôkô), the government wrote that there would be a “hinin, datai, nadono jin’iteki sanji seigen o kinshi bôatsusuru” (ban on and prevention of artificial birth control measures, such as contraception and abortion). See “Outlines of Fixed Population

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Policies,” January 22, 1941, available at http://rnavi.ndl.go.jp/politics/entry/bib00302 .php. For more on this issue, see Norgren, Abortion before Birth Control, 22–35. 88.  “Feminist Sees Japan Periled by Feudalism,” Lima News, February 2, 1937, p. 9; Henry Wood, “Feminist Sees Japan Periled by Feudalism,” Oshkosh Northwestern, March 3, 1937, p. 2. Chapter 5

1.  Ichikawa romanized her first name as Fusaye. 2.  Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 185–186. 3.  Ibid., 186. 4. Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (London: Belknap Press, 2000), 590–592. 5.  Gilbert Bowles, “Some Tentative Impressions of Japan and the Manchurian Situation,” Jane Addams Papers, edited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI, 1984, Reel 23. 6.  Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 214. 7.  “Japan Moves to Give Franchise to Women: Bill Introduced by Government Would Allow Them Right to Vote in Municipal Elections,” New York Times, February 6, 1931, p. 13; Hugh Byas, “Japanese Women Reject Less than Full Suffrage Women’s Franchise,” New York Times, February 15, 1931, p. 2. The WSL women like Ichikawa, in fact, rejected the bill; instead they demanded full participation in the local politics. For a discussion of this topic, see Sharon H. Nolte, “Women’s Rights and Society’s Needs: Japan’s 1931 Suffrage Bill,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 4 (December 1986): 690–714. 8. Dee Ann Vavich, “The Japanese Woman’s Movement: Ichikawa Fusae, a Pioneer in Woman’s Suffrage,” Monumenta Nipponica 22, no. 3/4 (1967): 420. 9.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Seisenka ni mukaeru fusendômei no kinenbi” [The anniversary of the suffrage league under the holy war], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, December 13, 1939, p. 6 (author’s translation). 10. Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Empowerment and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 92. 11.  Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 141. 12.  For writings on women’s organizations of the era, see Sandra Wilson, “Family or State? Nation, War, and Gender in Japan, 1937–45,” Critical Asian Studies 38, no.  2 (2006): 209–238; Sandra Wilson, “Mobilizing Women in Inter-War Japan: The National Defence Women’s Association and the Manchurian Crisis,” Gender and History 7, no. 2 (August 1995): 295–314; and Itô Yasuko, “Aikoku Fujinkai to josei no shakai katsudô” [The Patriotic Women’s Association and women’s social activism], in Gunkoku no onna tachi [Women in a militaristic state], ed. Hayakawa Noriyo (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kôbunkan, 2004), 75–93. 13. Ichikawa Fusae, “Kokumin sôdôin to fujin” [National mobilization and women], Josei Tenbô [Woman’s Outlook] 11, no. 11 (October 1937): 2.

178 Notes to Chapter 5

14.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Kongo no fusen undô mokuhyô” [Future goals of the suffrage movement], Fusen [Woman’s Suffrage] 7, no. 9 (September 1933): 4 (author’s translation). The usage of the term tactic is in the original. 15.  Gilbert Bowles, “Some Tentative Impressions of Japan and the Manchurian Situation,” January 14, 1932, Jane Addams Papers, Reel 23, Frame 540. 16.  “Jiei jô yamunaki kôdô o sekai no yoron mo shônin sen” [Act in self-defense: The world’s opinion will also agree], Yomiuri Shimbun, December 28, 1931, p. 2. For more on the issue of public access to news and the government’s press control in the 1920s and 1930s, see Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 570. 17.  Wilson, “Mobilizing Women in Inter-War Japan, 295–314, 297–298. 18.  Quoted in “Kono hijôji ni nozomu fujin no kansô to hihan” [Women’s critical views on the national emergency], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, November 18, 1931, p. 10. For relevant issues and women leaders’ views, see “Fujinkai tenbô” [Outlook on women’s circles], Fusen 5, no. 11 (November 1931): 22–23. 19.  Quoted in “Kono hijôji ni nozomu fujin no kansô to hihan,” 10. 20.  Quoted in “Fujinkai tenbô,” 22. 21.  “Manshû Jihen to Heiwa Kyôkai” [The Manchurian Incident and the Peace Association], Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai Kaihô, no. 5 (December 1931): 1. 22.  Ibid.; “Fujinkai tenbô,” 22–23. 23.  Letter from the WPAJ to the YWCA, the WCTU, the Women’s National Council, and the Women’s Suffrage League China, March 16, 1932, WILPF Records, Reel 133.79, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA. 24.  Ichikawa Fusae, Ichikawa Fusae jiden: Senzen hen [Autobiography of Ichikawa Fusae: The prewar period] (Tokyo: Shinjuku Shobô, 1974), 279. 25.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Kokusai heiwa to fusen” [International peace and woman’s suffrage], Fusen 5, no. 11 (November, 1931): 3. 26.  “Kono hijôji ni nozomu fujin no kansô to hihan,” 10. 27.  Ichikawa, “Kokusai heiwa to fusen,” 2–3; “Kono hijôji ni nozomu fujin no kansô to hihan,” 10. 28.  Kaneko (Yamataka) Shigeri, “Dainihon Rengô Fujinkai hakkai shiki haiken no ki” [A note on the opening ceremony of the Greater Japan Federation of Women’s Associations], Fusen 5, no. 4 (April 1931): 24 (author’s translation). 29.  Yamataka (Kaneko) Shigeri, Waga sachi wa waga te de [To find happiness on my own] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1982), 151 (author’s translation). Ichikawa Fusae also emphasized free expression of “women’s will” and “women’s voluntary actions.” See Ichikawa, “Kongo no fusen undô mokuhyô,” 4–5 (author’s translation). 30. This text was written in Japanese as follows: “Watakushi domo wa fujin naruga yueni, futatabi seijiteki munôryokusha to shite kengai ni torinokosare. . . . Watakushidomo wa naigai no jikyoku ga konnan ni nareba naru hodo sono urei o wakachi korega dakai ni kyôryokusen ga tame ni fujin sanseiken no hitsuyô o issô tsûsetsu ni kanzuru mono de aru.” See Katsuko Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi [Short history of the woman’s suffrage movement] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1981), 218–219 (author’s translation). 31.  Ibid., 228 (author’s translation). 32. Barbara Molony, “Ichikawa Fusae and Japan’s Pre-war Women’s Suffrage Movement,” in Japanese Women: Emerging from Subservience, 1868–1945, ed. Hiroko

Notes to Chapter 5  179

Tomida and Gordon Daniels (Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2005), 78. See also Vavich, “The Japanese Woman’s Movement,” 420. 33. Molony, “Ichikawa Fusae and Japan’s Pre-war Women’s Suffrage Move­ ment,” 80. 34.  Ichikawa, “Kongo no fusen undô no mokuhyô.” 35. Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi, 231–233; Vavich, “The Japanese Woman’s Movement,” 421; Sugawara Kazuko, Ichikawa Fusae to fujin sanseiken undô: Mosaku to kattô no seijishi [Ichikawa Fusae and the women’s suffrage movement: A political history in searching and struggling] (Yokohama, Japan: Seori Shobô, 2002), 219–223. 36. Vavich, “The Japanese Woman’s Movement,” 421; Kodama, Fujin sansei­ ken undô shôshi, 237–239. The English translation for the organization, Women’s Association for the Municipal Betterment of Tokyo, was used in “W.S.L. News,” Japanese Women 1, no. 1 (January 1938): 5. The WSL translated the names of organizations into English, including Woman’s Suffrage League for Women’s Suffrage League, the Ladies Patriotic Society for the Patriotic Women’s Association, and the Women’s National Defence Association for the National Defense Women’s Association. 37. Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi, 239–241; Sugawara, Ichikawa Fusae to fujin sanseiken undô, 98–105. 38. Sugawara, Ichikawa Fusae to fujin sanseiken undô, 159. 39.  Ibid., 219–232, 249–256. 40. Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi, 244–245. 41.  Hugh Byas, “Japanese Women Reject,” 2. 42.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Fusen jû nen no kutô: Etamono wa shiraga” [I only gained gray hair after a ten-year struggle], Yomiuri Shimbun, December 12, 1934, p. 7 (author’s translation). 43.  Ichikawa, “Kongo no fusen undô mokuhyô,” 4–5. 44. Yamataka (Kaneko), Waga sachi wa waga te de, 15; Kodama, Fujin san­ seiken undô shôshi, 269; “The Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need Becomes Effective,” Japanese Women 1, no. 1 (January 1938): 4. For other writings on this topic, see Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 145–148; Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, 104–106; and Vavich, “The Japanese Woman’s Movement,” 421–422. 45.  “Nayameru josei e jinsei annai no ie” [An agony column for troubled women], Yomiuri Shimbun, May 25, 1935, p. 7; Yamataka (Kaneko), Waga sachi wa waga te de, 14; “Boshi Hogo Hô no seitei” [The enactment of the Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need], Yomiuri Shimbun, December 20, 1936, p. 3. 46.  “Fusen jûô” [On woman’s suffrage], Fusen 8, no. 8 (August 1934): 26 (author’s translation). 47.  Yamataka (Kaneko), Waga sachi wa waga te de, 16–17. Among these items, providing an allowance to a child age thirteen or under in case the family was in financial distress and setting up welfare facilities for mothers and children were recognized. 48.  “The Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need” (Boshi Hogo Hô), Josei Tenbô 11, no. 4 (April 1937): 10 (author’s translation).

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49.  “Boshi Hogo Hô shikô ni kansuru tsûchô,” Josei Tenbô 12, no. 1 (January 1938): 6. 50.  “Boshi Hogo Hô jisshi kinen zadankai,” Josei Tenbô 12, no. 1 (January 1938): 27; “Ika ni kyô no hi o matta ka, ô, Boshi Hogo Hô” [How came today’s enactment of the Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need], Yomiuri Shimbun, February 24, 1937, p. 9. 51.  “Ika ni kyô no hi o matta ka, oh, Boshi Hogo Hô,” 9 (author’s translation). 52. Ibid. 53.  Molony, “Ichikawa Fusae and Japan’s Pre-war Women’s Suffrage Movement,” 81. Molony argues that although the law helped women and their children in need, it did not advance “women’s claims to full citizenship.” See Molony, “Ichikawa Fusae and Japan’s Pre-war Women’s Suffrage Movement,” 81–82. See also Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 145–148. 54.  Kaneko (Yamataka) Shigeri, “Dai 65 gikai ni nozomu” [To the 65th Dietcongress], Fusen 8, no. 1 (January 1934): 19. 55.  Vavich, “The Japanese Woman’s Movement,” 421. 56.  “Fusen jûô,” 26–27. 57.  Essay by an anonymous WSL member, n.d., Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô [Collection of the suffrage and women’s movements] (microfilmed), Ichikawa Fusae Kinenkai (Fusae Ichikawa Memorial Association), Nihon Tosho Center, Tokyo, 2005, Reel 4. The essay was probably written in 1935 to be published in Japan Woman’s News. 58.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Bosei hogo undô ni tsuite,” Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô (microfilmed), Reel 4. 59. The English name of the organization was used in “The Shino-Japanese Incident and the Activities of Japanese Women,” Japanese Women 1, no. 1 (January 1938): 3. 60. “Warera nani o subekika” [What should we do?], Josei Tenbô 11, no. 10 (October 1937): 3. The WSL understood that emphasizing women’s suffrage as the focus for the women’s rights movement during wartime was impractical. However, the WSL wanted to pursue women’s rights and gain public understanding about and support for its reform activities from women’s perspectives. Thus, the WSL stopped issuing Fusen in 1935; instead it published Josei Tenbô between 1936 and 1941. 61.  “Warera nani o subekika,” 7. 62.  “The Sino-Japanese Incident and the Activities of Japanese Women,” Japanese Women 1, no. 1 (January 1938): 3. 63. Ichikawa, “Kokumin sôdôin to fujin,” 2; Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi, 277–285. 64.  Molony, “Ichikawa Fusae and Japan’s Pre-war Women’s Suffrage Movement,” 80. The English name of the congress was used in “The Women’s Conference on Current Problems,” Japanese Women 1, no. 3 (May 1938), 3. 65.  “The Women’s Conference on Current Problems,” 3. 66. “Women’s Conference on War-Time Economy,” Japanese Women 3, no. 1 (January 1940): 4; “Josei mo sakebu, keizaisen kyôchô” [Women call for the cooperation for wartime economy], Yomiuri Shimbun, December 6, 1939, p. 2. 67.  “An Explanation by Miss Ichikawa,” Japanese Women 3, no. 3 (May 1940): 4.

Notes to Chapter 5  181

68. Ibid. 69.  “The Women’s Conference on Current Problems,” 3. 70.  “W.S.L. News,” Japanese Women 1, no. 2 (March 1938): 4. 71. Satô Toshiko, quoted in “Josei no shakaijihyô zadankai” [Women’s comments on current topics], Josei Tenbô 12, no. 10 (October 1938): 18. 72.  Gauntlett Tsune, “Fodder for Thought,” Japanese Women 3, no. 4 (July 1940): 3. 73. Ichikawa, “Kokumin sôdôin to fujin,” 2; Kodama, Fujin sanseiken undô shôshi, 277–285. 74. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, 106. 75. Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 153. 76.  Ôtsuki Terue, “Sekai taisen to Beikoku fujin no katsudô” [World War I and American women’s war activism], Josei Tenbô 11, no. 12 (December 1937): 15. 77.  Lucia Hanna Hadley, “Taisen-chû no Beikoku fujin no katsudô” [American women and their wartime activism], Josei Tenbô 12, no. 6 (June 1938): 2–3; see also “Chronicle,” Japanese Women 1, no. 6 (November 1938): 4. 78.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Fusen undô no kokusaiteki tenbô” [International perspective in the suffrage movement], Fusen 7, no. 6 (June 1933): 5 (author’s translation). 79.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Han Taiheiyô Fujinkaigi ni taisuru Nihon no taido” [Japan’s attitudes toward the Pan-Pacific Women’s Congress], Fusen 7, no. 12 (December 1933): 5. 80. During the period between the 1920s and the 1930s, four Pan-Pacific Women’s Conferences were held. 81.  Ichikawa, “Han Taiheiyô Fujinkaigi ni taisuru Nihon no taido,” 5. 82.  Katô Taka, “Han Taiheiyô Fujin Kaigi ni shusseki shite” [My experience in the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference], Fusen 8, no. 10 (October 1934): 12–15. 83.  “Hi? ze? gunji kyôren ni haha to shite no taido,” [Pros and cons: Military education in schools and mothers’ attitudes], Yomiuri Shimbun, August 24, 1934, p. 9. 84.  See Yasutake Rumi, “The First Wave of International Women’s Movements from a Japanese Perspective: Western Outreach and Japanese Women Activists during the Interwar Years,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 (2009): 18–19. 85.  “Women of Japan Play Their Part,” New York Times, August 15, 1937, p. 7. 86.  Ichikawa’s wording appears in “Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai dai 9-kai reikai hôkoku,” [The report of the 9th regular meeting of the Japan Women’s Committee for International Relations], January 30, 1930, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô (microfilmed), Reel 51. 87.  “Saikin no Ôbei fujin o kataru” [Talks about today’s Western women], Josei Tenbô 10, no. 11 (November 1936): 23–27. 88. Ichikawa, Ichikawa Fusae jiden, 450–451 (author’s translation). 89.  Ichikawa Haruko, “My Impression of America,” Japanese Women 1, no. 3 (May 1938): 1. 90. Ibid. 91.  “The Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need Becomes Effective,” 4. 92.  Ichikawa Fusae, “An Introductory Note,” Japanese Women 1, no. 1 (1938): 1. 93.  Ichikawa Fusae, “On My Return from China,” Japanese Women 3, no. 3 (May 1940): 1. Ichikawa visited China and met Chinese women leaders in 1940. 94. Ichikawa Fusae, “Problems Confronting Women’s Movement Today,” Japanese Women 3, no. 1 (January 1940): 1.

182 Notes to Chapter 5

95. Fujita Taki, “The Spiritual Life of Japanese Women,” Japanese Women 2, no. 4 (July 1939): 1. 96. Nogami Yaeko, “Reminiscences of My Trip Abroad,” Japanese Women 3, no. 2 (March 1940): 2. 97.  Ôtsuki Terue, “Eibun Nyûsu Nihon Fujin e no hannô” [Response to English News, Japanese Women], Josei Tenbô 12, no. 4 (April 1938): 4 (author’s translation). 98.  Letter from Ellen Brinton to Ichikawa Fusae, March 24, 1938, Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô (unfilmed), Ref. 2696: 1436. Ellen Brinton archived Japanese Women in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 99.  Records of letters to Japanese Women and subscription requests can be found in “Fusen undô Fusenkakutoku dômei Japanese Women” [The suffrage movement, the Women’s Suffrage League, Japanese Women], Fujin sansei kankeishi shiryô (unfilmed). 100. National Committee, YWCA, “Present Status and Main Problems of Japanese Women,” Japanese Women 1, no. 6 (November 1938): 3. 101.  “Letters to the Editor,” Japanese Women 3, no. 1 (January 1940): 3. 102. “Headquarters’ Action in Sino-Japanese Dispute: Recommendations to National Sections,” PAX International 12, no. 8 (November 22, 1937), p. 3, Pax International, 1925–1950, Reel 104.8, Collections of Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. 103. “Stop Aiding Japan, Says Women’s Plea,” New York Times, January 25, 1940, p. 6. 104.  “Embargo Idea Declared Unfortunate by Mrs. Tanaka,” Japanese Women 3, no. 4 (July 1940): 4. 105.  Hayashi Uta, “Let Us Be Friends,” Japanese Women 3, no. 1 (January 1940): 2. 106.  “Japan’s Suffragists Quit,” New York Times, August 27, 1940, p. 5. 107.  “Fujin dantai no tôgô kimaru” [The unification of women’s organizations has been decided (by the government)], Yomiuri Shimbun, February 14, 1941, p. 2. 108. For more on this topic, see Miyake Yoshiko, “Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and Women’s Factory Work under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 267–295. 109. Ichikawa, Ichikawa Fusae jiden, 532. 110.  Ichikawa Fusae, “Fujin dantai no tôgô” [The unification of women’s organizations], Yomiuri Shimbun, February 15, 1941, p. 4. 111. “Amerika josei e okuru kôkaijô” [An open letter to American women], Yomiuri Shimbun, March 4, 1941, p. 4 (author’s translation). 112.  Letter from Ichikawa Fusae to la Baronne Pol Boël, Japanese Women 3, no. 3 (May 1940): 4. 113.  Gauntlett, “Fodder for Thought,” 3. 114. Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 153. 115.  After World War II, building “a bunka kokka (civilized state)” became an important rhetoric to advance democratization of Japan. Officeholders often used this phrase in the National Diet. For example, see the record of the Health and Welfare Committee in the House of Representatives, July 28, 1947, in the records of proceedings of the National Diet. To access the National Diet records, see http://kokkai.ndl .go.jp.

Notes to the Epilogue  183

116. Regarding suffragists, see Molony, “Ichikawa Fusae and Japan’s Pre-war Women’s Suffrage Movement,” 83. Regarding peace, see Nakajima Kuni and Sugimori Nagako, eds., Nijû seiki ni okeru josei no heiwa undô: Fujin Kokusai Heiwa Jiyû Renmei to Nihon no josei [The women’s peace movement in the twentieth century: WILPF and Japanese women] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 2006), 106–117. 117.  See “Record of Meeting of Minister of State Konoye and General MacArthur, October 4, 1945,” Birth of the Constitution of Japan, available at http://www.ndl.go.jp/ constitution/e/shiryo/01/025_1shoshi.html. 118. Uchida Kenzô, “Japan’s Postwar Conservative Parties,” in Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation, ed. Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 309. 119. Kodama Katsuko, Oboegaki: Sengo no Ichikawa Fusae [Memorandum: Ichikawa Fusae after World War II] (Tokyo: Shinjuku Shobô, 1985), 30–31. Conclusion

1.  Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985) is also known as Nogami Yayoi. For more on this author, see Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from “Seitō,” 1911–16 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007), 204–221; and Mary Ritter Beard, The Force of Women in Japanese History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1953), 164–165. 2.  Nogami Yaeko, “Reminiscences of My Trip Abroad,” Japanese Women 3, no. 2 (March 1940): 2. 3.  Jane Addams, “Presidential Address,” in Women of the Pacific: Being a Record of the Proceedings of the First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference Which Was Held in Honolulu from the 9th to the 19th of August 1928, under the Auspices of the Pan-Pacific Union (Honolulu: Pan-Pacific Union, 1928), 13–14. 4.  Gauntlett Tsune, “Han Taiheiyô Fujin Kaigi kara kaette” [Reviewing the PanPacific Women’s Conference], Fusen 2, no. 9 (November 1928): 5 (author’s translation). Epilogue

1.  The book she refers to here is Mary Ritter Beard, Woman as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities (New York: Macmillan, 1946). 2.  This is a letter written February 8, 1951 and addressed to John Foster Dulles, consultant to the U.S. secretary of state. It was signed by twenty-seven Japanese women, including Fujita Taki, Gauntlett Tsune, Hiratsuka Raichô, Ichikawa Fusae, Jôdai Tano, Kubushiro Ochimi, and Nogami Yaeko. Dulles visited Japan to negotiate a peace treaty with Japan. 3. Susan J. Pharr, “The Politics of Women’s Rights,” in Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation, ed. Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987): 223. 4.  In this context, Mary Ritter Beard published her book The Force of Women in Japanese History in 1953, with assistance from Weed, Katô (Ishimoto), and several other American and Japanese women. 5.  Pharr, “The Politics of Women’s Rights,” 223.

184 Notes to the Epilogue

6.  For Gordon’s autobiography, see Beate Sirota Gordon, The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir (Tokyo: Kôdansha International, 1997). For other writings on the occupation period in Japan, see Uemura Chikako, Josei Kaihô o Meguru Senryô Seisaku [Occupation policies over issues about women’s liberation] (Tokyo: Keisô Shobô, 2007); Mire Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); and John Dower, Embracing Defeat (New York: Norton, 1999). 7.  Pharr, “The Politics of Women’s Rights,” 233. 8.  Letter from Mary Ritter Beard to Ethel Weed, October 31, 1946, Mary Ritter Beard Papers, Box 1, File 15, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. 9.  Letter from Mary Ritter Beard to Lt. Weed, February 25, 1947, Mary Ritter Beard Papers, Box 1, File 15. 10.  Letter from Mary Ritter Beard to Lt. Weed, August 31, 1947, Mary Ritter Beard Papers, Box 1, File 15. 11. Kodama Katsuko, Oboegaki: Sengo no Ichikawa Fusae [Memorandum: Ichikawa Fusae after World War II] (Tokyo: Shinjuku Shobô, 1985), 44–46. 12.  “Gist of the Hopes of Japanese Women for the Anticipated Peace Treaty” [Kôwa mondai ni kansuru Nihon josei no kibô yôkô], February 8, 1951, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Records (DG 043), Reel 133.79, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA. 13. Kodama, Oboegaki, 74–77; Nihon Fujindantai Rengôkai, ed., Fudanren no ayumi: Heiwa byôdô mezasu kyôdô to kokusai rentai no rekishi [The development of Japan Federation of Women’s Organizations: The history of cooperation and international solidarity to pursue peace and equality] (Tokyo: Nihon Fujindantai Rengôkai, 2009), 26–27.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abortion, 13, 88, 97–99, 111; laws on, 97, 111, 153–154n38 Addams, Jane: ideas of, 128–129; interaction of, with Japan, 73–74, 95, 129, 160n53; as leader, 50, 52; and peace movement, 62–64, 71, 73–74, 74, 120; on racism, 71 Alliance for the Promotion of a Mother and Child Protection Act (Boshi Hogo Hô Seitei Sokushin Fujin Renmei), 112. See also Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need (Boshi Hogo Hô, 1937) Ansei Five-Power Treaties, 9–10 Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hô), 14, 20, 37 Ashby, Corbett, 38, 47 Atomi Kakei, 160n53 Autonomy of Japanese feminists, 3–4, 6, 18, 32–34, 38, 49–50, 56, 128; in peace movement, 60–62, 68–69, 76, 134–135 Balch, Emily Greene, 68–69 Beard, Mary Ritter: and earthquake of 1923, 44–45; internationalism of, 56–57; and Japan, 25, 26, 34, 37, 42, 132, 160n53; on peace, 59; on personal and political life, 30; after World War II, 133–134 Birth control movement, 82–102; as linked with suffrage, 97–98, 102

Blue-stocking Society (Seitôsha), 36, 161n60, 161n66 Brinton, Ellen, 120 Capitalism, 8, 13, 41, 86, 89–90, 93; combined with feudalism, 92 Catt, Carrie Chapman: internationalism of, 26–28; and Japan, 28, 29, 38–39, 73, 169n19; and race, 175n53; and suffrage, 22, 26, 95; and World War I, 31; and World War II, 107 Central League for the National Spiritual Mobi­lization (Kokumin Seishin Sôdôin Iinkai), 115, 130 China, 27, 75, 78–79, 103, 117–119, 121, 127. See also Manchurian Incident; SinoJapanese War Christianity: Christian organizations, 16; Christian schools, 15, 23; and ethics, 15, 35–36; importance of, 2; and internationalism, 57; limitations of, 19; and nationalism, 17; and peace, 60, 65; and social activism, 15–19, 42, 51, 68; and socialism, 157–158n81. See also Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan (YWCAJ; Kirisutokyô Joshi Seinenkai) Class, 19, 35, 39, 41, 52–53, 85, 87–88, 92–93. See also Samurai class

202 Index

Commoners’ Society (Heiminsha), 19–20, 67, 157n79 Conferences: General Disarmament Con­ ference (Geneva, 1932), 79; Hague Peace Conference (1899), 16; International So­ cialist Congress (Stuttgart, 1907; Copen­ hagen, 1910; Bern, 1915), 9; International Woman Suffrage Alliance Conference (Stockholm, 1911; Budapest, 1913), 27, 32– 33; London Naval Conference (1930), 76– 77, 80; Washington Conference (1921– 1922), 71–74; Women’s National Emergency Congress (Jikyoku Fujintaikai, 1938), 115; YWCA World Conference (Canada, 1938), 17. See also Pan-Pacific Women’s Confer­ ence (PPWC) Confucianism, 11–12, 14–15 Conservatism, 38, 46, 69–70; in Japanese middle- and upper-class women, 107; in Japanese society, 87–88, 92 Cooperation with government in wartime: in Britain, 80, 107; in Japan, 4–5, 80, 105–106, 107–108, 116, 119, 123, 134; in the United States, 80, 107; and Women’s National Emergency Congress (Jikyoku Fujintaikai), 115. See also Strategic collaboration Crowdy, Rachel E., 54 Disarmament conferences: General Disarma­ ment Conference (Geneva, 1932), 79; Lon­ don Naval Conference (1930), 76–77, 80; Washington Conference (1921–1922), 71–74 Discourses: of civilization, 7–15; international feminist, 102, 127–128; and war, 31, 59– 60; of Western civilization, 1–2, 7–15, 35 Divorce, 14, 112 Divisions: between American and Japanese women, 121–122, 124; disunity of women’s groups, 20, 37–42, 52–53; wartime, 29–30 Education, 12–13, 28, 32–35, 42, 118; Christian, 15; and Iwakura Mission, 12, 28, 153n26; and peace, 75 Eugenics, 7; and birth control movement, 88–91; and Margaret Sanger, 83; National Eugenics Law, 101–102 Factory women, 50. See also Yamanouchi Mina Family, 13, 34, 86, 92–93, 98; American idea of, 2; family-state ideology, 12–13,

123, 130, 149n13; legislation affecting, 14; and welfare support, 42. See also Marriage Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 29–31 Federation of Japanese Women’s Organiza­ tions (FJWO; Nihon Fujin Dantai Ren­ mei), 80, 114–115, 123 Feminism, definition of, 4, 58 Feminists, direct contact between, 23, 26– 28, 34, 38, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 73–74, 85, 95, 99, 116, 133, 160n53. See also Confer­ ences; Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference (PPWC); Peace movement Fifth National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW), 75–78, 122 Ford, Alexander Hume, 51 Freedom and People’s Rights movement (Jiyû Minken Undô), 10–11 Fujita Taki, 49, 119–120 Fukuda Hideko: activism of, 11, 19, 67, 157n79, 163n86; imprisonment of, 11 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 19, 156–157n71 Fusen, 48, 112. See also Women’s Suffrage League (WSL; Fusen Kakutoku Dômei) Gauntlett Tsune, 18, 156n65; and adoption of suffrage cause, 38–39; criticism of, 39, 80, 117; and Inaugural General Congress for the Women’s Suffrage League, 45; international marriage of, 49; and peace movement, 60, 68, 76–77, 80, 117; and prostitution and trafficking, 53–54; on race, 77; and rejection of militant activism, 38; in wartime, 114, 115; after World War II, 125, 129 Gender, 7–9, 11–15, 18–19, 34, 44, 63; and masculine consciousness, 59, 76 General Disarmament Conference (Geneva, 1932), 79 General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (GHQ/ SCAP), 125, 132–134; Civil Information and Education Section (CIE), 132 General Mobilization Law (Kokka Sôdôin Hô, 1938), 101 “Good wife and wise mother” ideology, 12, 33, 41, 55, 57, 62, 78, 84; and war, 66 Goodwill, 64, 68, 70–71, 74–75, 79–80, 108, 117–118 Gordon, Beate Sirota, 133 Greater Japan Federation of Women’s Associations (GJFWA; Dai Nihon Rengô Fujinkai), 105, 109

Index  203

Great Japan Press Association (Dai Nihon Genron Hôkokukai), 134 Great Kanto Earthquake, 25, 42, 56 Great Treason Trial (Taigyaku Jiken Shinri), 20, 157n79. See also Rebellion Hadley, Lucia Hanna, 116 Hague Peace Conference (1899), 16 Hamaguchi Osachi, 47, 104 Hatoyama Haruko, 32–33, 65 Hayashi Uta, 68, 76, 80, 103, 122 Heiminsha (Commoners’ Society), 19–20, 67, 157n79 Hinder, Eleanor M., 54–55 Hiratsuka Raichô, 1, 36, 37, 97, 98, 117, 147n1; and birth control movement, 175n70; and Blue-stocking Society, 161n60; after World War II, 134 Ichikawa Fusae: and Christianity, 16; and Equal Rights Amendment, 50; on internationalism, 116–117, 123–124; and Japanese Women, 118; and New Women’s Association, 37; and Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 53, 53, 117; and peace movement, 108, 134; and suffrage movement, 56, 105, 106, 110, 125, 177n7; and United States, 38, 46, 110, 123; and wartime cooperation with government, 5, 106, 108, 115, 119, 123–124, 134, 150n19; and women’s rights, 97, 178n29; and Women’s Suffrage League, 46–47, 47, 48, 49; after World War II, 125–126, 134; and World War II, 103, 106 Ie (household), 13–14, 86. See also Family Imperialism: Japanese, 20, 75, 78–79, 152n12; Western, 9. See also Militarism Industrialization, 10, 20, 124 Infanticide, 88, 112 Inoue Hideko: and disarmament, 72, 166n140; on internationalism, 80–81; on Japanese difference, 70; and Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 52–53; on racism, 72; and Women’s Peace Association in Japan, 60–62, 68, 70, 171n51 International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAWSEC), 23–24, 46–48, 121. See also International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), 31, 64–65, 67, 169n17. See also Women’s Interna­

tional League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) International Council of Women (ICW), 48 Internationalism, 2–3, 19, 21, 26–32, 56–59, 103; among feminists, 23, 26–28, 34, 38, 44, 46, 47, 48, 73–74, 85, 95, 99, 116, 133, 160n53; origins of, 8–9; Pan-Pacific, 51; socialist, 9, 59; transnationalism, 2–3, 149–150n15. See also Conferences; PanPacific Women’s Conference (PPWC); Peace movement International Socialist Congress (Stuttgart, 1907; Copenhagen, 1910; Bern, 1915), 9 International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), 22, 23, 26–32, 46–47, 52, 57; conferences of (Stockholm, 1911; Budapest, 1913), 27, 32–33; and Gauntlett Tsune, 38–39; and Japanese educators, 32–35; and trafficking, 54. See also International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAWSEC) Ishimoto (Katô) Shidzue, 49, 129–130; arrest of, 101, 176n81; and birth control movement, 82–102, 175n70; criticism of, 87, 90, 95; on family system, 93; on Japanese women, 93–94; and Mary Ritter Beard, 44; and neo-Malthusianism and eugenics, 88–91; and peace movement, 100; on poverty, 85–86; and suffrage, 57, 97–98; on Taishô period, 40; and United States, 85, 95–96, 101, 102; on unity, 82; upbringing and marriage of, 84–85, 92; during World War II, 58 Iwakura Mission, 12, 28, 153n26 Jacobs, Aletta: and exchanges with Japan on peace, 65; and visits to Japan, 26–27, 28; and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 31 Japan, Western perception of, 25, 44–45 Japanese Birth Control League (Nihon Sanjichôsetsu Renmei), 175n70 Japanese difference: perception of, 119–120; preservation of, 18, 33–34, 61–62, 70. See also Autonomy of Japanese feminists Japanese women, 11–15, 23, 35, 93–95, 123, 133–134, 147n1; and birth control, 83–84; and law, 50; patience of, 93; and property, 14; submission of, 84; and work, 13, 24, 42, 85–86. See also Birth control movement; Divorce; “Good wife and wise mother” ide­ ology; Marriage; Motherhood; Prostitution

204 Index

Japanese Women, 105–106, 116, 118, 120– 122. See also Women’s Suffrage League (WSL; Fusen Kakutoku Dômei) Japanese Women News, 105–106. See also Women’s Suffrage League (WSL; Fusen Kakutoku Dômei) Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU; Nihon Fujin Kiri­ sutokyô Kyôfûkai), 42, 46, 57, 117; and nationalism, 17–18, 80; and Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 52; and peace movement, 60, 64–65, 72, 76; and problems of identity, 148n8, 155n52; and social activism, 16, 42, 44, 56, 68; and suffrage, 37–39; and Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 2. See also Gauntlett Tsune; Japan Woman Suffrage Council (JWSC; Nihon Fujin Sanseiken Kyôkai) Japanese Women’s League for Birth Control (Nihon Sanjichôsetsu Fujin Dômei), 98– 99 Japan Woman Suffrage Council (JWSC; Nihon Fujin Sanseiken Kyôkai), 37, 39, 40, 45. See also Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU; Nihon Fujin Kirisutokyô Kyôfûkai) Japan Women’s Committee for International Relations (JWCIR; Kokusai Renraku Fujiniinkai), 55–56 Japan Women’s Medical Association (Nihon Joikai), 52 Jôdai Tano: and internationalism, 73, 79–80; on militarism and social issues, 75–76; and Women’s Peace Association in Japan, 60, 69–70, 78; after World War II, 134 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, 77, 95–96 Joint Committee of Women’s Suffrage Groups (JCWSG; Fusen Dantai Rengô Iinkai), 109, 112 Josei Dômei (Women’s Alliance), 38, 161n60. See also New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai) Jus Suffragii (International Woman Suffrage News), 22–23, 27–29. See also International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) Kaneko (Yamataka) Shigeri, 49, 53; and government control, 109, 115; and Research Institute for Women’s Problems, 97 Kanno Suga, 20, 157n79 Katô Shidzue. See Ishimoto (Katô) Shidzue Katô Taka, 117

Kawakami Isamu: and Women’s Inter­ national League for Peace and Freedom, 67, 163n85; on Women’s Peace Society of Japan, 40–41 Kawasaki Natsu, 49; and birth control movement, 98; on Protective Law, 113 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 78 Kishida Toshiko, 11 Koizumi (Shimizu) Ikuko, 117 Kubushiro Ochimi, 49; and earthquake of 1923, 42; as opposing licensed prostitution, 43; and suffrage, 39, 45 Kusunose Kita, 10–11 Labor disputes: of 1907, 88; of 1921, 40 Laws: on abortion, 97, 111, 153–154n38; Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hô), 14, 20, 37; General Mobilization Law (Kokka Sôdôin Hô, 1938), 101; Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, 77, 95–96; National Eugenics Law (Kokumin Yûsei Hô, 1940), 101–102; Political Assembly and Association Law (Shûkai Oyobi Seisha Hô, 1890), 13–14; Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need (Boshi Hogo Hô, 1937), 112–113; Regulations on Public Meetings Ordi­ nance (Shûkai Jôrei, 1880, 1882), 11 League of Nations, 32, 54–55, 71, 104 League of Women Voters (LWV), 24, 46, 50. See also National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Legislation. See Laws London Naval Conference (1930), 76–77, 80 Macmillan, Chrystal: on internationalism and peace, 64; and International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 29–30, 31 Malthusianism. See Eugenics; Neo-Malthu­ sianism Manchurian Incident, 78–79, 98, 103–110. See also China Marriage, 14, 24, 37; and nationality, 48–49. See also “Good wife and wise mother” ideology Marxism, 89 Meetings. See Feminists, direct contact between Meiji period, 10–17, 20, 34, 104, 149n13; Christians in, 17, 148n8, 154n43. See also Modernization

Index  205

Militarism, 52, 75, 99–100, 103–104, 118; General Mobilization Law (Kokka Sôdôin Hô, 1938), 101. See also Imperialism Modernization, 10, 20, 124. See also Meiji period Mori Arinori: and “good wife and wise mother” ideology, 12–13; and Westerniza­ tion, 156–157n71 Moriya Azuma: on peace and mothers, 72; on rebuilding Tokyo, 56 Motherhood, 12, 30, 34, 63, 72, 112. See also “Good wife and wise mother” ideology; Protection laws National American Woman Suffrage Associa­ tion (NAWSA), 26, 31, 50. See also League of Women Voters (LWV) National Charter Oath (Gokajô no Gosei­ mon), 10 National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW), 75–78, 122 National Defense Women’s Association (NDWA; Dai Nihon Kokubô Fujinkai), 105, 109 National Eugenics Law (Kokumin Yûsei Hô, 1940), 101–102 National feeling, 4, 58, 100 Nationalism, 4; in Britain, 80; and Christian­ ity, 17; in Japan, 4, 11, 14, 20, 58, 66, 98, 104; recruiting women for, 14, 80, 105, 109; in the United States, 31, 80 Nationality, 48–49 National League for the Abolition of Licensed Prostitution (Zenkoku Kôshô Haishi Kisei Dômei), 43 National Woman’s Party (NWP), 24, 46, 49–50, 96, 116 National Women’s League (Zenkoku Fujin Dômei), 52–53 Neo-Malthusianism, 7, 83, 88–91. See also Eugenics New True Women (Shin Shin Fujin), 36 New True Women Association (Shin Shin Fujinkai), 36, 161n61 New women, 16. See also Blue-stocking Society (Seitôsha); New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai) New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyôkai), 26, 37, 38, 40–42, 69 Nishikawa Fumiko: and the Heiminsha, 20, 157n79, 163n86; and New True Women Association, 36

Nitobe, Mary Elkinton, 60–61, 64, 67, 68 Nitobe Inazô, 60, 68, 84 Nogami Yaeko, 120, 127 Oku Mumeo, 37, 161n60 Orientalism, 8; feminist, 2, 4, 8, 25, 29, 44–45, 133. See also Race and racism Ôsaka Incident, 11, 152n21 Ôtsuki Terue: and Japanese Women, 118; on value of wartime collaboration, 116 Pan-Pacific Association of Osaka (Osaka Han Taiheiyô Kyôkai), 52 Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference (PPWC), 165n127; in Honolulu (1928), 50–57, 75, 128–129; in Honolulu (1934), 117; in Vancouver (1937), 80, 117 Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujinkai), 14, 42, 105, 107, 109 Paul, Alice, 47; and Equal Rights Amend­ ment, 50; and friendship with Ichikawa, 46; and nationality issue, 48 Peace movement, 31, 58–81; and socialism, 9 Peace petitions, 76, 79 Peace Preservation Ordinance (Hoan Jôrei), 11 Post–World War II period, 95, 125–126, 132–135; and Civil Information and Edu­ cation Section (CIE), 132; and General Headquarters of the Supreme Command­ er of the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP), 125, 132–134; and Peace Treaty of Japan (1951), 134 Poverty, 43, 75, 83, 85, 89, 112 Private and public spheres. See Public and private spheres Proletarian Women’s Alliance (Musan Fujin Dômei), 109 Prostitution, 13, 42–44, 53–54, 111. See also Trafficking Protection laws, 111–113; and Equal Rights Amendment, 50 Protective Law for Mothers and Children in Need (Boshi Hogo Hô, 1937), 112–113 Public and private spheres, 12–14, 34–35, 66, 82–102, 176n81. See also Family Quakers: Alice Paul, 46, 47, 48, 50; Ellen Brinton, 120; Jôdai Tano, 60, 69–70, 73, 78, 79–80; Mary Elkinton Nitobe, 60–61, 64, 67, 68; on militarism and social issues, 75–76; after World War II, 134

206 Index

Race and racism, 7–8, 54, 63, 71–72, 77, 83, 91, 95, 119–120, 175n53 Radicalism, 38, 40–41. See also Heiminsha (Commoners’ Society) Rebellion, 10–11, 20, 40. See also Great Treason Trial (Taigyaku jiken shinri); Ôsaka Incident Red Wave Society (Sekirankai), 37, 39–41, 69. See also Radicalism Regulations on Public Meetings Ordinance (Shûkai Jôrei, 1880, 1882), 11 Repression, 11, 13–14, 20, 39–40, 88, 90– 91, 101–102, 107, 110, 123. See also Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hô); Great Japan Press Association (Dai Nihon Genron Hôkoku­ kai); Great Treason Trial (Taigyaku jiken shinri); Ôsaka Incident Rice riots, 40 Russo-Japanese War, 14, 17, 66–67 Ryôsai kenbo. See “Good wife and wise mother” ideology Sakai (Kondô) Magara, 39. See also Red Wave Society (Sekirankai) Sakai Tameko, 20 Samurai class, 10, 14–15, 17, 19, 33, 84 Sanger, Margaret: and birth control and eugenics, 82–83; influence of, in Japan, 87, 100, 130; and Ishimoto, 86 Seitō (Blue-Stocking), 36, 37, 147n1, 161n63, 161n66 Seitôshia (Blue-stocking Society), 36, 161n60, 161n66 Sekai Fujin (Women of the World), 19. See also Fukuda Hideko Sexually transmitted disease, 37, 98 Sheepshanks, Mary, 31 Shimoda Utako: on education and traditional Japanese culture, 33–34; and friendship with Beard, 34, 160n53 Shin Shin Fujin (New True Women), 36 Sino-Japanese War: First (1894–1895), 14; Second (1937–1945), 80, 103, 114–115, 119 Social Gospel movement, 18, 35 Socialism, 3, 19–21, 125; and International Socialist Congress, 9 Social Masses Women’s League (Shakai Taishû Fujin Dômei), 112 Social welfare activism, 35; after earthquake of 1923, 25, 42; in wartime, 110–112, 114–116

Stevens, Doris, 48 Strategic collaboration, 111; in wartime 114– 116, 119, 129, 133. See also Cooperation with government in wartime Suffrage, 20–21, 25–27, 29, 108; establishment of, in Japan, 126 Suffragism, 23, 24; in Britain, 23, 38; early, 11; in 1902–1920, 26–32; in the United States, 38; in wartime (1931–1941), 103– 126 Taishô period, 39–40 Takeuchi Shigeyo, 46, 53 Tanaka Teruko, 121–122 “Third wave” feminist movement, 2–3 Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations (TFWO; Tokyo Rengô Fujinkai), 42–45, 52, 82. See also Unity in the women’s movement Trafficking, 13, 32, 53–55. See also Prosti­ tution Transnational feminist movement, 2–3, 149–150n15. See also Internationalism Treaties: Ansei Five-Power Treaties, 9–10; Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 78; Peace Treaty of Japan (1951), 134 Tsuda Umeko, 28, 169n19; on class, 41; and Iwakura Mission, 12; on patriotism, 66; and peace movement, 64, 67; and suffrage, 28, 32–33 Unity in the women’s movement, 44–45, 47, 82, 102, 127, 129; and Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations, 42–45, 52, 82 Unity problems. See Divisions U.S.-Japanese relations, 9 Wada (Kôra) Tomi, 74; on Japanese women’s interests, 74; on peace and Japan’s situation, 107–108 Wartime, social activism in, 30–31 Washington Conference (1921–1922), 71–74 Weed, Ethel, 132–134 Welfare. See Social welfare activism Westernization, 10 Woman’s Alliance for the Imperial City Administration (Tokyo Fujin Shisei Jôka Renmei), 110 Woman Suffrage Alliance (WSA; Fujin Sansei Dômei), 42 Women of the World (Sekai Fujin), 19. See also Fukuda Hideko

Index  207

Women’s Army Corps (WAC), 132. See also Weed, Ethel Women’s Committee on Postwar Countermeasures (Sengo Taisaku Fujin Iinkai), 125–126 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 24, 31, 59, 64, 73, 129, 169n29; congresses of, 75; and embargo of Japan, 121; exclusion of, from Washington Conference, 71; and Jôdai Tano, 75–76; and Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 50, 52; principles of, 59–60, 62, 72; and stereotypes of the East, 25; and Women’s Peace Association in Japan, 60–61, 64–71, 74, 78–79, 171n51; on women’s rights and peace, 59; after World War II, 135. See also International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP) Women’s National Emergency Congress (Jikyoku Fujintaikai, 1938), 115 Women’s Peace Association in Japan (WPAJ; Fujin Heiwa Kyôkai), 60–62, 67–75, 77–81, 129; and China, 74–75, 78–79; and cooperation with government, 80; and differences with Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 60, 68–70, 78; and earthquake of 1923, 42; foundation of, 60–61, 64–68; identity of, 61–62, 68, 70; and Jane Addams, 74, 171n51; limitations of, 108; male members of, 170n32; and Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 52; and Washington Conference, 71–73 Women’s rights, 10–11, 18, 28, 32, 36–38, 45, 51–52, 78, 109, 112–113, 133, 156– 157n71; and Japanese Christians, 18; right to run for political office, 102, 133 Women’s Suffrage League (WSL; Fusen Kakutoku Dômei), 17, 26, 53, 80, 130; and affiliation with International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizen­

ship, 47–48; and cooperation with government, 105–106, 109, 115–116, 122–124; disbandment of, 122; foundation of, 45; international contact of, 46, 49, 55–56, 116–117, 130; and Ishimoto, 97; and Jap­ anese Women, 105–106, 116–121, 122; and Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 52; so­cial activism of, 110–113; wartime activ­ism of, 114–116, 180n60. See also Ichikawa Fusae; Gauntlett Tsune Working conditions, 8; in Miike Coal Mines, 85–86, 92. See also Japanese women World War I, 29–31 Yajima Kajiko, 72. See also Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU; Nihon Fujin Kirisutokyô Kyôfûkai) Yamakawa Kikue: on Article 5 and limitations of women’s movement, 41; and birth control movement, 87; on Freedom and People’s Rights movement, 11; on limits to freedom of speech in 1920s, 90–91; on Protective Law, 113; and Red Wave Society, 39; refusal of, to cooperate with government, 116; and Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations, 42–43 Yamamoto Sugi, 98, 99 Yamanouchi Mina, 155n54; and Christian­ ity, 16; on class, 41 Yosano Akiko: pacifist poem by, 66–67; and suffrage fund-raising, 97 Yoshioka Yayoi, 107 Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan (YWCAJ; Kirisutokyô Joshi Seinen­ kai), 16–17, 42, 46, 65; and Federation of Japanese Women’s Organizations, 80; and Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 52, 56, 117; and Women’s Peace Associa­ tion in Japan, 60 YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Associ­ ation) World Conference (Canada, 1938), 17

Taeko Shibahara is an independent scholar who teaches part time at Doshisha University and Ryukoku University. She is a co-translator of Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil’s Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents.