Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan by Curtis Anderson Gayle

Author:Curtis Anderson Gayle [Gayle, Curtis Anderson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, General, Japan, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781135238438
Google: McdN4O0ot5IC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-01-11T15:55:06+00:00

The role of Shinozaki Masaru and the Modern History Institute

Like the examples of Tokyo and Nagoya, in Ehime too we find a prototype history-writing organization from within which the group took shape and began to evolve in its own right. Just as the Tokyo group took shape from within the Association of Democratic Scientists, and the Nagoya group from within the Asahi Women's History Circle, so the Ehime group was directly inspired and pushed forward by Shinozaki Masaru's Modern History Institute. Even in the Nagoya case, in which the prototype organization was run by women, the presence of male advisors to the writing of history should not be overlooked. Shinozaki, in fact, served as an advisor to the Ehime Women's History Circle from its initial conceptualization in late 1955, until his own death in 1999. Although the Ehime group, like its counterparts in Tokyo and Nagoya, sought to challenge the male stranglehold on authentic history/history-writing, they chose to begin and to remain connected with Shinozaki—a Marxist historian of the male persuasion who had ties to nationwide history organizations like the Historical Science Society. Marxists had been at the forefront of attempts to make history-writing a kind of “revolutionary praxis” for the creation of subjectivity, or agency. As noted throughout this book, those interested in writing local women's history had no previous examples from which to draw and they were, in a manner of speaking, entering uncharted waters. Although once the local women's history movement of the late 1960s took off, reliance on male historians and their institutions might have seemed out of place, during the previous decade it was not at all strange to find male historians and their organizations serving as weigh-stations and sources of inspiration for fledgling women's history-writing groups.

It is perhaps at this juncture helpful to discuss the issue of how far the Ehime, Tokyo and Nagoya groups could go to shake off the historical patriarchy embodied by historians like Shinozaki, Ishimoda and others. Thus far, it has been argued that by appropriating some of the assumptions and methods of progressive history, local women's history was able to extract itself from some of the more patriarchal aspects of national history emerging during the first decade after World War II. This same relation of appropriation/extraction can also be seen in the role of professional male historians as advisors to each of the groups. Ideally, this author certainly would have preferred no presence at all of professional male historians associated with organizations in Tokyo. At the same time, however, their presence did provide a living connection to the methods and dynamism of Marxist approaches and helped maintain an interest in writing history from the margins of Japanese society. In this respect, the example of Shinozaki Masaru is quite telling.

In 1953 Shinozaki Masaru established the Modern History Institute, or Kindai-shi Bunko, in Matsuyama in order to help impart history-writing as an existential means for local residents to gain greater awareness of history.34 From interviews with founding members of the EWHC

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