The Japanese by Christopher Harding

Author:Christopher Harding [Harding, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141992297
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Composed by a former student of Tsuda’s, Hiratsuka Raichō, this was the opening salvo in a war that Tsuda had always counselled her girls against fighting. Back in 1902, she had established her own household, legally freeing herself of her father’s influence and altering her name from ‘Ume’ to ‘Umeko’. (Ko, meaning ‘girl’ or ‘princess’, had been used for centuries by women of noble rank in Japan. Free, in the Meiji era, to change their own names, many commoner women chose it for themselves.) But Tsuda still cherished Japan’s old cooperative ethic, within families and across society, and hoped to see women reform it from within. Hiratsuka preferred to attack it. She mounted an assault on unequal marriage (which rendered women ‘slaves during the daytime and prostitutes at night’), on the demeaning terms of the Civil Code, and on the kind of life-limiting domesticity peddled not just in schools but by magazines like Woman’s Friend (Fujin no Tomo). Such publications were stuffed full of tips on housekeeping and cookery alongside adverts for products designed to confirm the kitchen as a woman’s natural sphere, from handy stand-up workspaces to gas-burning rice cookers. Japan’s first department store, Mitsukoshi, opened in 1904 in Nihonbashi, bringing magazine adverts to life and promoting a tie-up of commerce and conservative social values that helped to define women’s lives for many years to come.

Hiratsuka wanted women to read journals like hers instead. Bluestocking (Seitō) featured ‘In the beginning’ in its very first issue, reminding people that whatever the Civil Code might say, Japan’s origins lay not with a man but with a Sun Goddess. Tsuda was willing to acknowledge that the associated literary group, Seitōsha (Bluestocking Society), was home to some ‘clever’ writers. But she denounced the likes of Hiratsuka nonetheless as ‘immoral’, ‘lawless’ – even as ‘agents of the devil’ – for promoting ideas that were ‘foreign’ to Japan.

Despite their differences, Tsuda and Hiratsuka were similar in that they both targeted women of relatively high social status, and found liberation in the life of the mind. Elsewhere in Japan during these same years, sorrier circumstances were pushing women towards more radical solutions. One of the dark sides of the great industrial strides made thanks to men like Shibusawa was the treatment of textile workers. Many were young girls, recruited to live and work in factory-dormitory complexes in return for an up-front payment to their parents. Songs of the time told of harsh conditions: twelve-hour shifts worked at pace, meals of rice mixed with sand, pay deductions for the smallest infraction, violence and sexual abuse. Some girls ran away. Others pressed on, their music and writings revealing them as unlikely recruits to Shibusawa’s mutual-aid model of labour relations: ‘Let’s wrench the balls of the hateful men!’; ‘Bosses are vipers, our bitterest enemies’.

Socialism and anarchism flourished amongst some of these women, giving rise in 1910 to a failed attempt on the Emperor’s life. A woman called Kanno Sugako had been due to throw the first bomb. She used

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