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The New Japanese woman
Modernity, media, and women in interwar Japan
By Barbara Hamil Sato Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3044-X
Chapter One
The Emergence of Agency WOMEN AND CONSUMERISM
The adage "consumption, thy name is woman" resonates with such venerable authority that one might expect to find it cited in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, attributed to some Victorian Savant or to an eminent critic of modern frippery.
If women figure not only as the proverbial shoppers, the Un-decorators, the perennial custodians of the bric-a-brac of daily life but also as objects of exchange and consumption, what then can be inferred about the relationship of man, males, and masculinity to the world of commodities? -Victoria de Grazia
The conditions that set the stage for the modern girl, the self-motivated middle-class housewife, and the professional working woman in the 1920s had in fact germinated in Japan in the 1910s. It was at this time that the notorious "new woman" (atarashii onna), a woman who transgressed social boundaries and questioned her dependence on men, started to pose a threat to gender relations. Contemporaneous with her coming were the first intimations of consumerism. This nascent consumerism reflected the development of an industrialized state taking root after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) and came to shape the desires of an ever-widening segment of society. Growing intellectual concernscentering on ascetic and spiritual practices thus co-occurred with growing materialistic desires.
From the early twentieth century, the term new woman in Japan connoted a progressive group of educated young intellectual women who found solace in self-cultivation through reading, writing, and meditation. The liberation these women sought, which included a demand for social equality, overturned the common notion of femininity. In May 1902, the newspaper Yomiuri, anxious to capitalize on the "Woman Question," as the Victorians called it, went so far as to add a special column titled "New Woman" to its daily features. Japan's new woman waxed less vocal about the monthly hormonal changes affecting her sexual feelings than did her sisters Olive Schriener and Eleanor Marx in Britain; nor was she as embroiled in the suffrage campaign as some of her American counterparts. Yet, she too aimed to situate herself within the intellectual and cultural practices of society in search of creative fulfillment. She engaged in activities that encompassed only a small number of women with literary aspirations, however, with the result that the scope of her interests remained circumscribed.
Hiratsuka Raicho, the principal founder of the Bluestocking Society (Seitosha) and its literary magazine, Bluestockings (Seito), asserted: "I am a new woman. As new women we have always insisted that women are also human beings. It is common knowledge that we have opposed the existing morality, and have maintained that women have the right to express themselves as individuals and to be respected as individuals." Raicho articulated her position with pride in a January 1913 special issue of Chuo koron (Central Review), a general interest magazine for intellectuals devoted to the new women.
From the time that Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House debuted on the stage of Oslo's Christiana Theater in Norway in 1879, the fictional image of Nora and the new woman were synonymous. By forsaking her position as bourgeois wife and mother, Nora portended the changes that were soon to affect intellectual women in far-reaching parts of the world. The dissatisfaction expressed in the play with the prescribed gender roles that defined Nora's marriage led to a celebration of the individual that resonated with feminine intellectual discourse in Japan.
The acclaim that actress Matsui Sumako received for her rendering of Nora in Shimamura Hogetsu's 1911 Japanese production of the play stemmed more from the emotional response generated by Nora's boldness in female audiences than to Matsui's artistic talents. The play's impact on its Japanese audience acted as an interface between the newly emerging agenda and the public, of which middle-class women formed a significant proportion.
On the surface, consumerism and the new woman in Japan appeared antithetical. In fact, however, they shared a close bond in the context of twentieth-century Japanese women's history. The new woman reflected a departure from state-imposed values. She lashed out against the "good wife and wise mother" morality that served as the ideological legitimization of the legal status of married women institutionalized in the Meiji Civil Code (1898), which determined women's legal and social status and place in the family. Although legal scholars in recent years have argued that aspects of the Civil Code were beneficial in the legalization of human rights, the Meiji Civil Code provided only limited protection for women in the domestic and social arenas. In everything from its articulation of divorce procedures to property rights, the code worked in favor of men. Hidden within the "benefits" of the code were an increasing number of middle-class women relegated to a way of life defined by home and family.
In the early 1890s, the home was idealized in Sakai Toshihiko's socialist journal Katei zasshi (Home Journal), and in the family column of the mammoth publisher Hakubunkan's more conservative intellectual journal Taiyo (The Sun), as a space where husbands and wives shared responsibilities. But by the late 1890s the home had come under the purview of the state. Women, made the cornerstone for implementing a new national identity, were assigned specific gender roles as wives and mothers. Emphasis on "hard work and simple living" expressed a quintessential virtue for all Japan's citizens. The "good wife" positioned at the core of this morality epitomized these traits. The dawning of the cultural and social aspects of a consumer society in the early twentieth century threatened to undermine that ideology. Consumerism-buying for the sake of buying-posed a challenge to the state's call for frugality and struck a discordant note in its rhetoric.
Early-twentieth-century consumerism in Japan may be described as a form of visual representation. Although it as yet bore only the merest hint of the complexities that would be wrought by postwar mass culture, the products it made available nevertheless titillated women's imagination. While the exposure of women to commodities for personal and household use probably incited and played on their anxieties, it also very likely offered simultaneously the hope/opportunity for a satisfactory form of release from the desire for material goods, which had previously been largely repressed. Photographs of women browsing in department stores suggest a form of escapism. No doubt escape was what some women longed for.
Whether or not women had the wherewithal to purchase new products is of secondary importance. More significant was the empowerment that consumerism, as an expression of decision making, offered to them. Women figured as active role players weighing the positive and negative consequences of the commodification of the everyday. Paul Glennie observes that "department stores were pivotal sites of cultural appropriation and identity construction, through their ability to create the meanings of commodities and consumers." In writing about early-twentieth-century America, Richard Ohmann notes that "products and their auras resided not only in proper social space but in the system of symbols," through which people perceived "their affinities, their place in the world, and their historical agency." Ohmann cautions, however, that "to grasp consumption as the same activity with the same meanings across class lines is to falsify the reality of the time." In Japan, too, cumulative social changes were disrupting life in city and country alike. On the one hand, there was a pull to maintain the ties of family; on the other hand, signs of instability sent tremors through the domestic community and through society as a whole.
Another link between consumerism and the new woman in Japan is evident in the media that developed rapidly late in the nineteenth century. The media, with consumerism as its intermediary, was social testimony of women's cerebral development and material wants. By 1890, almost every family subscribed to at least one newspaper. Advertisements for cosmetics and medicine excited women's interest in commodities for their everyday use and accounted for the biggest percentage of all advertisements in the early twentieth century. The media demonstrated the enormous allure of goods promised through the conduit of newspapers and magazines. The early use of the media as an instrument of consumer capitalism brought changes both in women's consciousness and in the concept of gender. Thus, the media served not only as a forum for the assertion of new political and social rights for women, starting with the new woman, but also as a vehicle for the spread of consumerism and the desire for new things and the lifestyle they embodied.
Yellow journalism was a mainstay of many Western-language newspapers in the United States from the time California publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst purchased the New York Morning Journal in 1895. In Japanese society, where an obsession with "proper" appearances ran deep, media coverage also promoted scandalous news stories. The visit by members of the Bluestocking Society to the pleasure quarters in Tokyo's Yoshiwara district and the "five-colored cocktail" incident, reports of which castigated the group of women for their brazen drinking in public, disrupted assumptions surrounding appropriate behavior for genteel women. While the sensational accounts of their actions brought untoward social recognition to these self-proclaimed "new women," the reportage favored by the press raised many eyebrows and complicated the problematic placement of the new woman. The hullabaloo that reinforced her "deviant" behavior further enhanced the media's power. It also affirmed the determination of some intellectual women in the early twentieth century not to subjugate their desires. The autonomy sought by these women was not entirely beyond their reach. Although their yearnings emerged within the structure of the nation-state, they were amplified by the allure of commercial forces.
In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, the state's emphasis on nation building leveled off and shifted to include, if only slightly, the gratification of individual desires. Journalist Tokutomi Soho, in examining the cultural formations that propelled young men in the Meiji period to act, commented that they "differed from their predecessors in having developed an individual awareness," and they lacked "all, or at least a major portion of the national awareness." For middle-class women, the implications of the shift coupled with the challenges that resulted from the maturation of the industrialized state after World War I took concrete form following the Great Kanto Earthquake. By the mid-1920s the commodification of the everyday that was embraced by middle-class urban women-abroad term used here to refer to women, most of whom lived in Tokyo, with at least an elementary-school education and a basic level of literacy-was closely linked to the conspicuous aspects of a rising consumer society.
The rebelliousness simmering among these women found expression in popular culture through the mass media: women's magazines, movies, radio programs, popular music, and jazz. A cultural shift that affected middle-class women directly was required for them to incorporate and formulate the experiences that were to transform the parameters of their existence. The time was right for them to utilize resources like mass magazines whose editors and publishers now had women as their targets, women who yearned to recognize their own voices in print. The information made available by the media was not disinterested, and as consumers, women were no mere passive receivers. The media afforded women a way to forge a relationship with a broader segment of society. Women perceived the possibility of creating their own social relations using techniques such as self-cultivation, or shuyo, that would give special meaning to their lives. For many of these women, consumerism created a new set of images by which they could better understand who they were, or at least who they might be.
Women Challenge the Modern
In the early twentieth century a group of young literary feminists conveyed dissatisfaction with existing gender relationships as they were configured by the nation-state and courageously attempted to disengage themselves from the rhetoric endorsed by the national interest. That is not to say that the promotion of women's freedom from longstanding social restraints was unknown before the formalization of the "good wife and wise mother" ideology and the advent of the "new woman." Debates on the status of women had existed before. For the most part, however, intellectuals, regardless of their ideological leanings, stressed two avenues through which women could override conventional images. The first included enlightenment through education and reading. Iwamoto Yoshiharu's Jogaku zasshi (Magazine for Women's Learning, 1885-1904) was one of the earliest women's magazines to hail the attainment of equal rights. Fukuzawa Yukichi, a major contributor to the narratives addressing the awakening of women, lamented women's lack of social awareness. In his 1885 treatise On Japanese Women (Onna no Nihonjinron), Fukuzawa proposed that husbands and wives share responsibility for educating their children. To prepare women for this task, Fukuzawa recommended a school curriculum that placed economics and science above calligraphy and simple math. Insistent on marital fidelity (though he himself was known to have dallied), he urged couples to combine their family names after marriage to create a new family name. For Fukuzawa, a harmonious marriage accorded women equal property rights and free rein over their emotions both spiritually and sexually, which implied the right to divorce. Although Fukuzawa directed his treatise to women whose everyday lives were informed by domesticity, and presumably hoped his proposals would have an effect on unmarried young women as well as housewives, his views did not find practical application during his lifetime.
In private schools, educators including Shimoda Utako, Tsuda Umeko, Hatoyama Haruko, and Naruse Jinzo worked to consolidate and expand educational opportunities for women limited by the 1899 edict that clamped down on Christian mission schools and exerted state control over girls' secondary education. But like Iwamoto and intellectuals such as Fukuzawa and Nakamura Masanao, the measures these educators advanced were not antagonistic to the ideals of the state. Further, Japanese-style Confucian ethics contained the prescription for the "good wife and wise mother" philosophy that Shimoda, Hatoyama, and others endorsed. With male education the priority and women's education an afterthought, gender divisions evolved in accordance with plans for the nation-state. Marked gender differentiation was apparent in the reading materials and curricula of both private and state-run institutions.
Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century the spread of education had brought with it the concomitant growth of an intellectual class that included a small number of socially attuned women. Welfare organizations like the Women's Reform Society (Fujin kyofukai), established by Yajima Kajiko, Sasaki Toyosu, and others in 1886 and recognized as the Japanese chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (Nihon kirisutokyo fujin kyofukai) in 1893, reached out to the downtrodden. Young women's working conditions in factories and the prostitution that proliferated both in Japan and abroad informed the tone of their crusades. Representative of this breed of outspoken young women in the early twentieth century was the poet Yosano Akiko, whose powerful poems protesting the Russo-Japanese War received wide acclaim, and Hiratsuka Raicho, the main force behind the Bluestockings.
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