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What Can Home Economics Be? Education, Gender, and the Making of Schoolteacher Sonoda Mineko in a Hokkaido Mining Town
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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As a fellow Tokyoite once observed, Hokkaido people have a knack for interesting self-introductions. It's surely in part because everyone other than the indigenous Ainu came rather recently from elsewhere, and even people in late youth and early middle age are apt to be in touch with that history of migration: of the adventures and misadventures of grandparents and great-grandparents in the throes of rapid settlement (often with corresponding displacement), industrializing agriculture and fishery, global trade, imperial expansion (“Karafuto” still coming up more often in conversation than “Sakhalin”), accompanied by requisite academic investments in fields such as agronomy, foreign language, economics, and cultural production as well as, of course, movements of resistance to the same.
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1 See the fine new translation by Zeljko Cipris, The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013). See also Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Why a Boom in Japanese Proletarian Literature? The Kobayashi Takiji Memorial and The Factory Ship” (APJ Japan Focus, June 29, 2009) and Norma Field, “Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji's Cannery Ship” (APJ Japan Focus, February 17, 2009).
2 As she states in the Afterword to her most recent poetry collection, Henshin (Ryokugeisha: Kushiro, Hokkaido, 2016), p. 141.
3 I was then ignorant of the history of home economics at the University of Chicago, my long-term employer. Marion Talbot headed a Department of Household Administration in 1904, in which students would address “‘the problems of the home and the household’ through such existing disciplines as physics, chemistry, physiology, bacteriology, political economy, and sociology.” Uncertainty over whether “study of the household deserved the University's distinguished name” and declining enrollment led to disbandment in 1956.
4 Some of this aspirational language survives in an Education Ministry website, Waga kuni no kyōiku keiken (Kateika kyōiku). A critical history can be found in Tsuruta Atsuko, Kateika ga nerawareteiru: Kentei fugōkaku no ura ni [Home economics education under threat: Behind the failure to pass textbook screening] (Asahi Shimbunsha, 2004), especially Chapter 4, “Home Economics as Bearer of National Policy.”
5 See “Kateika wa dōtoku de wa nai!” [Home economics is not morals] in Tsuruta, pp. 86-93 and “Shōshi kōreika jidai no fukushi” [Welfare in an era of declining birthrate and aging population], pp. 96-104.
6 Tsuruta, pp. 113-14.
7 In English, see Alice Gordenker, “Sewing and Cookery Aren't Just for the Girls” in the Japan Times (November 16, 2001).
8 CEDAW was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974, with Japan voting in favor. Careful examination revealed that 150 items in Japanese law contravened provisions of the Convention, leading to protracted contestation over whether Japan would actually ratify it. In addition to home economics, the Nationality Law and labor laws had to be changed before Japan could move to ratification in 1985, the final year of the UN Decade for Women. See Nuita Yōko, Yamaguchi Mitsuko, and Kubo Kimiko, “The U.N. Convention on Eliminating Discrimination Against Women and the Status of Japan” in Women and Politics Worldwide, ed. by Barbara J. Nelson and Najma Chowdhury (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 398-414 for a succinct, comprehensive discussion.
9 See David McNeill and Adam Lebowitz, “Hammering Down the Educational Nail: Abe Revises the Fundamental Law of Education,” APJ Japan Focus (July 9, 2008).
10 See Lawrence Repeta, “Japan's Proposed National Security Legislation: Will This Be the End of Article 9?” (APJ Japan Focus, June 21, 2015). Passage of the legislation (dubbed “steamrolling” by its opponents) on September 19 has led to protests at the Diet on the 19th of each month.
11 See Brian Wakefield and Craig Martin, “Reexamining ‘Myths’ about Japan's Collective Self-Defense Change—What critics (and the Japanese public) do understand about Japan's constitutional re-interpretation,” APJ Japan Focus (September 8, 2014).
12 Satoko Kogure's “Turning Back the Clock on Gender Equality: Proposed Constitutional Revision Jeopardizes Japanese Women's Rights,” APJ Japan Focus dates back to May 22, 2005, but remains depressingly current. See also David McNeill, “Nippon Kaigi and the Radical Conservative Project to Take Back Japan,” APJ Japan Focus (December 14, 2015).
13 Massan was the NHK morning serial drama airing from September 20014 through March 2015. It recounted the travails of Masataka Taketsuru and his Scottish wife Jessie Roberta “Rita” Cowan as they pursued his dream of brewing genuine scotch in Japan. Sonoda's reminiscences appear in Yoichi Bungei, No. 34 (March 31, 2009) under the title “‘Nikka’ ga tanoshimi o kureta: Kodomo no koro no omoide” (Nikka brought us pleasure: Memories from childhood).
14 As in sukūringu, the practice of bringing together correspondence students for actual classroom instruction.
15 Japan Women's University established a correspondence division in 1948, according to its website.
16 Poet, novelist, critic, and translator (1905-1969). Rival of proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji (1903-33) at the Otaru Higher School of Commerce. Later became known for his translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which became the subject of a protracted trial, resulting in a guilty verdict from the Supreme Court in 1957.
17 Expression for “top student,” from the prewar practice of the emperor bestowing silver watches to top graduates at select institutions (in the case of Tokyo Imperial University, until 1918).
18 The roots of this Methodist mission school go back to 1874, when missionaries from the Methodist Episcopal Church of the U.S. established a girls' elementary school.
19 At its peak in 1948, Utashinai counted approximately 46,000 residents It has been Japan's smallest city for some time now, with a population numbering 3,615 as of April 30 2016, according to the municipal homepage.
20 As is often the case, standardized testing in schools has been a controversial subject in postwar Japan. More familiar than the high school testing under discussion here is the Scholastic Achievement Test (gakuryoku tesuto) in compulsory schooling, that is, elementary and middle schools. The struggle over its implementation led to court battles through the 1960s, culminating in a Supreme Court decision in 1976. For a discussion in English, see Teruhisa Horio, Educational Thought and Ideology in Modern Japan: State Authority and Intellectual Freedom (University of Tokyo Press, 1988), pp. 180-87, 213-45. The original, unrevised Fundamental Law of Education (see McNeill and Leibowitz) was crucial in these struggles. The title to chapter 8 in Horio's text captures the essence of what was at stake, for compulsory education as well as the high school testing that Sonoda Mineko encountered in its early stages: “The Ministry of Education's Scholastic achievement Test: Economic Growth and the Destruction of Education” (p. 213) The Scholastic Achievement Test fell into abeyance for nearly 40 years but has been revived in the 21st century.
21 Common shortened form for Nichibei Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku, or the US-Japan Security Treaty, as it is commonly referred to in English. Deriving from the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, it has notably provided for stationing sizable numbers of US troops in Japan, most significantly in Okinawa. The 1960 revision and renewal occasioned the largest mass protests in postwar Japanese history; the 1970 renewal stirred mass student uprisings. The Treaty is once again in the public eye with the second Abe regime's heightened campaign for Consitutional revision through such measures as passage of the law legitimating collective self-defense law and insistence on relocating the Marine Air Corps Station in Futenma to Henoko Bay in Okinawa despite sustained, concerted opposition.
22 Since 1996, the Social Democratic Party of Japan.
23 See Horio, 264-69.
24 Acronomym for Kateika Kyōiku Kenkyūsha Renmei, or League of Researchers in Home Economics Education. According to the website, it is a nongovernmental research organization established in 1966, “in order to confront the reality of the lives of the people of Japan, to overcome the contradictions therein, and to strive to clarify directions for practice.” The summer 2015 assembly issued an appeal to mark the 50th anniversary of the organization's founding by affirming the Constitution and the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child as a means for placing children at the center of efforts to safeguard life, peace, and democracy. Recent documents on the website reflect concerns about respecting children as autonomous beings, not the possession of parents and adults; practices necessary for achieving gender equality; domestic violence; sex education as a component of home economics; and LGBT youth.
25 See Horio, pp. 269-78 for how teachers sought to sustain their research and in-service training independently of, and indeed, in the face of discouragement by, the Education Ministry.
26 The political party formed in 1964 as the political wing of the postwar Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai (“Value Creation Study Association”), junior coalition partner of the Liberal Democratic Party since 1999. The tension between the pacifism proclaimed by the religious association and the implication of partnership with the LDP, which has long been determined to undo Article 9, the “no-war” clause of the Constitution, came to a head last September with the forcible passage of the security legislation in September 2016. See Levi McLaughlin, “Komeito's Soka Gakkai Protestors and Supporters: Religious Motivations for Political Activism in Contemporary Japan” (APJ Japan Focus, October 12, 2015).
27 According to the entry for “usagi goya” in the etymological dictionary, Gogen yurai jiten, the expression originated in a 1979 informal EC (European Community) report on strategic responses to Japanese economic strength. “We live in rabbit hutches” went on to become a derisive and, I can't help thinking, wistful expression of Japanese recognition of the gap between economic prowess and the actual experience of everyday life on the part of most individuals.
28 “Abe seiken hihan no mongoniri bungu, umu o chōsa; Hokkaido no gakkō” in Asahi Shimbun (October 15, 2015).
29 Regional social welfare councils (shakai fukushi kyōgikai) are non-governmental organizations. See “Biei-chō shakyō no Ampo chirashi ni Jimin yokoyari; Shobun yōkyū; ‘konran maneita’ 4 riji tainin” in Hokkaido Shimbun (December 13, 2015).