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From “Old Miss” to New Professional: A Portrait of Women Educators Under the American Occupation of Japan, 1945–52
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Extract
The unmarried female schoolteacher may qualify as the most written about, yet least understood, figure in the history of modern education. She emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a literary stereotype defined by the likes of Miss Priscilla Batte, that “shapeless yet majestic” matron of Dinwiddie Academy in Ellen Glasgow's Virginia, the Cabot sisters in Joseph Lincoln's Mary-Gusta, or the ever vigilant Miss Dorothy Gibbs, head of the Female Institute in Thomas Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy. Stiff, humorless, and punctillious to the end, these grim products of the literary imagination were construed to typify an entire profession that seemed peculiarly vulnerable to caricature. Until World War I, at least, teaching and “spinsterhood” were synonymous in the public mind. And the self-denigration that accompanied acceptance of the “old maid” stereotype presumably blunted the creative urge to write. As several American historians have noted, there is a remarkable paucity of memoirs and autobiographies, through which the subject could speak for herself; thus, we know little about the proverbial lady who stood in front of the chalkboard.
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References
Notes
The author wishes to express his appreciation to Mrs. Helen Seamans, formerly Helen Hosp, whose papers have been used extensively in this essay. Mrs. Seamans generous advice contributed greatly to the article. Special thanks are also due Mr. Robert Radin, who introduced me to Mrs. Seamans, and to four training-course members (Fujieda Ai, Nakata Haru, Morita Sumi, and Mitate Chiyo) who shared their memories with me. An earlier version of the article was presented at the Amherst Conference on Occupation Japan in August 1980.
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31. Ibid., p. 43; see also introductory remarks on October 10, 1949 by Kumura Toshio in the Seamans' papers.Google Scholar
32. Letter from Mori Kikuno to Helen Hosp, December 20, 1949.Google Scholar
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38. English notes for lecture on December 6, 1949 (Seamans' papers).Google Scholar
39. Pharr, Susan, “The Politics of Women's Rights Reforms during the Allied Occupation of Japan,” in Ward, Robert and Yoshikazu, Sakamoto, eds., Policy and Planning during the Allied Occupation (forthcoming).Google Scholar
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41. This point was stressed during interviews with Fujieda Ai (Akita: June 20, 1979) and Nakata Haru (Tokyo: June 25, 1979). Both were participants in the training course. In addition, careful distinctions between “Miss” and “Mrs.” are made throughout the English notes for the lectures.Google Scholar
42. The wording is taken from Arthur Traxler's Techniques of Guidance (New York, 1945), p. 3. Hosp referred frequently to this book during the training course.Google Scholar
43. Seamans, , “Japanese Women and Democracy,” p. 2.Google Scholar
44. Ibid., p. 44.Google Scholar
45. Ibid., pp. 51–52.Google Scholar
46. Hōdō, Joshi Shūkai, Kenkyū, ed., Daigaku ni okeru joshi no gaidansu, p. 68.Google Scholar
47. Ibid., pp. 397–399.Google Scholar
48. Ibid., p. 388. I discuss the association of student life with adolescence in my book Schooldays in Imperial Japan: A Study in the Culture of a Student Elite (Berkeley, 1980).Google Scholar
49. Letter from Murakami Sawa to Helen Hosp received in late December 1949.Google Scholar
50. Letters to Helen Hosp from Yamada Hisae (December 26, 1949), Murakami Sawa (late December 1949), Oguro Rei (December 23, 1949), and Morita Sumi (late December 1949).Google Scholar
51. The letters to Helen Hosp which emphasize family hardship include those written by Nogami Kisako (late December 1949), Tanaka Tomi (December 22, 1949), Mori Kikuno (December 20, 1949), Nagai Fumi (late December 1949), and Yamada Hisae (December 26, 1949).Google Scholar
52. Letters to Helen Hosp from Tanaka Tomi (December 22, 1949) and Maeda Yoshiko (December 20, 1949). The remarks by Yoshida Takeko are taken from the English notes for the discussion on November 22, 1949. Both Fujieda Ai and Nakata Haru have provided me with additional information about Miss Yoshida.Google Scholar
53. Letter from Tsunemi Hisae (December 25, 1949).Google Scholar
54. Letters from Nogami Kisako (late December 1949), Tsunemi Hisae (December 25, 1949), Hayashi Akiko (late December 1949), and Maeda Yoshiko (December 20, 1949).Google Scholar
55. Letter from Tsunemi Hisae (December 25, 1949).Google Scholar
56. Letter from Hayashi Akiko (late December 1949). Because of the particularly sensitive nature of this woman's disclosures, I have chosen to use a pseudonym.Google Scholar
57. Letter from Maeda Yoshiko (December 20, 1949). As with the previous woman, I have chosen to use a pseudonym.Google Scholar
58. Letters from Hayashi Akiko (late December 1949) and Yamada Hisae (December 26, 1949).Google Scholar
59. Letter from Yamada Hisae (December 26, 1949).Google Scholar
60. Letter from Tsunemi Hisae (December 25, 1949).Google Scholar
61. Letter from Maeda Yoshiko (December 20, 1949).Google Scholar
62. Letters from Tsunemi Hisae (December 25, 1949) and Fumi, Nagai (late December 1949).Google Scholar
63. The post-course letters are quoted in Seamans, , “Japanese Women and Democracy,” pp. 63–64.Google Scholar
64. My thanks to Kaminuma Hachirō, Professor of Education at Jissen Women's University, for explaining this in a discussion on August 5, 1981 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Also letters to this writer from Nakata Haru (April 26, 1982) and Fujieda Ai (May 10, 1982) stress this point.Google Scholar
65. Letter to this writer from Nakata Haru (April 26, 1982).Google Scholar
66. Curiously American advisers on higher education between 1950 and 1952 established guidance workshops in an historical vacuum, denying, either through intention or ignorance, that there was an earlier Occupation legacy upon which to build. No mention is made, for example, of previous guidance workshops in Wesley P. Lloyd's book, Student Counselling in Japan (Minneapolis, 1953). On thequestion of guidance for university women, the prevailing CIE view in 1950 and 1951 seemed to be aimed at deterring what one American adviser called “the highly aggressive feminist” rather than promoting self-awareness and independence. (See Ibid., p. 88) Google Scholar
67. Letter to this writer from Morita Sumi (April 15, 1982).Google Scholar
68. In her letter (April 26, 1982), Nakata Haru suggests that geographic separation was the most important factor in the fading of the deans' organization.Google Scholar
69. Interview with Fujieda Ai (June 20, 1979).Google Scholar
70. Letter from Nakata Haru (April 26, 1982).Google Scholar
71. Letter to this writer from Mitate Chiyo (May 10, 1982).Google Scholar
72. Nakata Haru (April 26, 1982) is most insistent about the instrumental role of the training course in launching the public careers of at least several of the deans. Sugimori Ei's most recent article is entitled “Yūgure mo akaruku,” Fujin no tomo (February, 1982), pp. 90–93.Google Scholar
73. Letter from Morita Sumi (April 15, 1982).Google Scholar
74. See, for example, the pioneering article in this newly opened field of inquiry: Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1–29.Google Scholar
75. English notes for discussion session on November 22, 1949 (Seamans' papers).Google Scholar
76. For more on the quest for self among young intellectuals and students in postwar Japan, see Lifton, Robert Jay, “Youth and History: Individual Change in Postwar Japan” in Lifton, Robert Jay, History and Human Survival (New York, 1970), pp. 24–57 and Victor Koschmann, J., “The Debate on Subjectivity in Postwar Japan: Foundations of Modernism as a Political Critique,” Pacific Affairs 54 (winter 1981–82): 609–631. After the Occupation, there was a proliferation of informal writing circles which encouraged groups of working-class men and women to express themselves freely. Tsurumi Kazuko discusses one such group in her essay “The Circle: A Writing Group among the Textile Workers” in Kazuko, Tsurumi, Social Change and the Individual: Japan before and after Defeat in World War II (Princeton, 1970), pp. 213–247.Google Scholar
77. Letters from Mitate Chiyo (May 10, 1982), Nakata Haru (April 26, 1982), and Morita Sumi (April 15, 1982). Also interview with Fujieda Ai (June 20, 1979).Google Scholar