Table Of ContentGendering
Modern
Japanese
History
,..,;t
Barbara Molony and
Kathleen Uno, editors
Harvard East Asian Monographs, 251
Gendering
Modern
Japanese
History
,..;t
Barbara Molony and
Kathleen Uno, editors
Published by the Harvard University Asia Center
and distributed by Harvard University Press
Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2005
© 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Printed in the United States of America
The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese
Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further
scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center
also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gendering modern Japanese history / Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno,
editors. -- 1st ed.
p. cm. -- (Harvard East Asian monographs ; 251)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-674-01780-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-674-02816-6 (paperback : alk. paper)
1. Sex role--Japan--History. 2. Japan--History--1868– . 1. Molony,
Barbara. 11. Uno, Kathleen. 111. Series.
HQ1075.5.J3G44 2005
305.3'0952--dc22
2005013998
Printed on acid-free paper
1st paperback edition: 2008
Last figure below indicates year of this printing
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Acknowledgments
This project owes a great debt to the sixteen dedicated scholars who
helped to bring it into being. The stimulating workshop in February
1997 permitted us to share our expertise in gender history and to cri
tique one another's drafts. Following the workshop, the contributors all
rewrote their chapters to link them to the others in the volume. Nu
merous individuals and departments at Santa Clara University lent both
material and moral support to this project. The College of Arts and Sci
ences (which granted us its first Intellectual Community Grant), the Of
fice of International Programs, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics,
and the Program for the Study of Women and Gender funded the
opening workshop. Generous grants from Santa Clara's History De
partment and the Office of the Provost underwrote the editorial assis
tance of students Maki Kanimoto, Michelle Pritchard, and Kelly
Greenwalt and Women's and Gender Studies Program Coordinator
Rosa Guerra-Sarabia. Ann Beyer made all the arrangements for the
workshop. We are also indebted to Professors Joby Margadant and
Nancy Unger of Santa Clara University and Douglas Painter and Peter
Gran of Temple University for their incisive comments. As always,
Thomas Turley was a tremendous support.
Contents
About the Contributors IX
Introduction Barbara Molotry and Kathleen Uno
I. Gender, Self11ood, Culture
I I\1ade in Japan: .Meiji Women's Education Martha Tocco 39
2 Thoughts on the Early Meiji Gentleman Donald Roden 6r
3 Commodifying and Engendering Morality: Self-Cultivation
and the Construction of ilie "Ideal \'\'oman" in 1920s Mass
Women's 11agazines Barbara Sato 99
II. Genders, Bodies, Sexualities
4 "S" is for Sister: Schoolgirl Intimacy and "Same-Sex Love"
in Early Twentieili-Century Japan Gregory M. Pjlugftlder 133
5 Seeds and (Nest) Eggs of Empire: Sexology Manuals/
Manual Sexology Mark Driscoll 191
6 Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage Restriction
Legislation in the 1920s Sumiko Otsubo 225
III. Gender, Empire, War
7 Making "Soldiers": The Imperial Army and the Japanese
Man in Meiji Society and State Theodore F. Cook, Jr. 259
VIII Contents
8 Reading the Japanese Colonial Archive: Gender and
Bourgeois Civility in Korea and Manchuria before 1932
Barbara]. Brooks 295
9 Women's Deaths as Weapons of War in Japan's "Final
Battle" Haruko Taya Cook 326
IV. Gender, Work, Economy
10 Gendering the Labor Market: Evidence from the Interwar
Textile Industry Janet Hunter 359
II Sorting Coal and Pickling Cabbage: Korean Women in
the Japanese Mining Industry W Donald Smith 393
12 Managing the Japanese Household: The New Life
Movement in Postwar Japan Andrew Gordon 423
V. Theorizing Gender
13 The Quest for Women's Rights in Turn-of-the-Century
Japan Barbara Molony 463
14 Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of
"Good ~rife, Wise Mother" before 1931 Kathleen Uno 493
15 Toward a Critique ofTranshistorical Femininity
Ayako Kano 520
16 Feminism and Media in the Late Twentieth Century:
Reading the Limits of a Politics of Transgression
Setsu Shigematsu 555
Index 591
About the Contributors
Barbara Brooks is a professor of Japanese and East Asian history at
the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York. Author of Japan’s Imperial Diplomacy (University of Hawai‘i Press,
2000), she is currently working on a book on gender and marginality in
the Japanese empire.
Haruko Taya Cook is co-author of Japan at War: An Oral History (New
Press, 1992), and is completing a book for Viking tentatively titled The
War Within: The Japanese Experience of War, 1931–1945. She is professor
emerita at Fordham University Marymount College.
Theodore F. Cook is a professor of Japanese history and director of
Asian Studies at William Paterson University of New Jersey. He is co-
author of Japan at War: An Oral History. He is completing a book on the
Japanese people’s experience during the Second World War in Asia and
the Pacific and is writing a social history of the Japanese army.
Mark Driscoll, assistant professor of East Asian and International
Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, currently works on Japanese colonial-
imperialism, focusing on sexuality, value, and the vampirization of dif-
ference. His monograph on colonial intellectual and propagandist
Yuasa Katsuei will be published in 2005 (Duke University Press).
Andrew Gordon is Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at
Harvard University. He has written on the history of labor and man-
agement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan and on the politics
X About the Contributors
of labor in the prewar era. He is currently studying Japan's twentieth
century emergence as a mass consumer society, with a focus on the
sewing machine.
jANET HuNTER is Saji Professor of Economic History at the London
School of Economics and Political Science. She obtained her DPhil.
from Oxford, and subsequently taught at the University of Sheffield.
She is the author of Women and the LAbour }vfarket in Japan's Industrialising
Economy (Routledge Curzon, 2003).
AY AKO KANO is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian
Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Her pub
lications include Acting Like a Woman in A1odern Japan: Theater, Gender,
and Nationalism (Palgrave, 2001).
BARBARA MoLONY, professor of Japanese history and former director of
the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Santa Clara University,
has published works on Japanese women's rights and gender theory.
She is currently co-authoring (with Kathleen Molony) a biography of
Ichikawa Fusae.
SuMrKo 0Tsuso received her PhD from Ohio State University, where
she completed her dissertation on "Eugenics in Imperial Japan: Some
Ironies of Modernity, r883-1945." Currently, she teaches at Metropolitan
State University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
GREGORY M. PFLUGFELDER is an associate professor ofJ apanese history at
Columbia University and author of Cartographies ofDesire (UC Press, 1999).
His work spans the premodern, early-modern, and modern periods, fo
cusing on issues of gender and sexuality, body histories, and representa
tions of monstrosity.
DoNALD RoDEN is a member of the History Department at Rutgers Uni
versity and author of Schooldqys in lntpe1ial Japan (University of California
Press, 1980).
BARBARA SATO is a professor of Japanese history and women's studies
at Seikei UniYersity in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of The New Japa
nese ff/oman: Media, lviodernity, and Women in Intenvar Japan (Duke Univer
sity Press, 2003). Her present work explores lower middle-class and
working-class women and their links to consumerism in the rg2os.
