Chapter 18 - Women and War: Yosano Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko

Summary

Yosano Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko were highly acclaimed women writers during Japan’s empire-building era. While they—and their fictional characters in the homeland and outer territories of modern Japan—refused the ideological assignments that subjected their minds and bodies to nation-building, they also became active and sometimes aggressive participants in the creation of empire and its war efforts. This chapter explains the contradictory ways in which Japanese women envisioned and experienced the modern empire and—despite their marginalization because of their gender, class, ethnicity, and/or race—emerged as active agents both against and for the war efforts of the Japanese empire.

Introduction

In attempts to understand the specific roles women played during the military aggression of the Japanese empire, scholars have for the most part presented Japanese women as (1) sacred mothers or goddesses who protected life and peace; (2) passive victims of men, the Japanese government, or Western imperial powers; (3) resilient strugglers at the fringes of society; or (4) artists and activists resisting state-driven nationalism. These four positions tend to smooth over the roles of women who actively participated in the formation of nationalism as a discursive tool serving Japan’s expansion as an empire.

As historian Suzuki Yūko points out, in the 1970s and the 1980s the paradigm shifted from viewing women as victims to exposing them as aggressors when the following question was raised: Why did notable feminists such as Hiratsuka Raichō, Ichikawa Fusae, and Takamure Itsue make a commitment to imperialism? Since then, scholars of women’s history have argued the value and effects of exposing the support of female artists and intellectuals for imperial war efforts (see Nishikawa 1982; Suzuki 1986; Kano 1987). For example, Suzuki investigates female intellectuals’ activities during the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods and challenges what she characterizes as the long-established framework that has uncritically vindicated the aggressors among them. In contrast, sociologist Ueno Chizuko characterizes Suzuki’s approach as a historical perspective of “accusation” and instead suggests that women’s decisions and actions in support of imperial Japan were determined by the historical and political contexts of the time.