The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture

Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, Mark Pendleton, Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, Pendleton Mark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351716789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This Companion is a comprehensive examination of the varied ways in which gender issues manifest throughout culture in Japan, using a range of international perspectives to examine private and public constructions of identity, as well as gender- and sexuality-inflected cultural production.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture features both new work and updated accounts of classic scholarship, providing a go-to reference work for contemporary scholarship on gender in Japanese culture. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, with chapters drawing from a range of perspectives, fields, and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, history, law, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, politics, and sociology. This reflects the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the dual focal points of this volume—gender and culture—and the ways in which these themes infuse a range of disciplines and subfields.

In this volume, Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, and Mark Pendleton have brought together an essential guide to experiences of gender in Japanese culture today—perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in Japan, culture, gender studies, and beyond.

PART I
Theorizing and historicizing gender and Japanese culture

1
Gendering modern Japanese history

A historiographical update

Barbara Molony

The “Introduction” to Gendering Modern Japanese History, an edited collection of essays initially presented at a 1997 workshop at Santa Clara University, was crafted in 2005 by my co-editor, Kathleen Uno, and me. The collected essays and our description of the state of the field focused on two major issues—the imbrication of gender and modernity and the impact of “gendering” (by which we meant gendered analysis) on undermining dominant historical narratives, a major goal of feminist historiography frequently articulated at that time. The introduction noted important historical trends that addressed those issues from the late twentieth century through the first half-decade of the twenty-first. We were still able to write at that time, “While modern Japanese history has not yet been restructured by a foregrounding of gender, historians of Japan have, indeed, begun to embrace gender as an analytic category” (Molony and Uno 2005, 1). While the dominant narratives of modern Japanese history had not yet been sufficiently challenged by considerations of gender (our introduction’s second major issue, as noted previously), the insertion of gender as an analytic category into existing narratives such as modernity was well underway.

Since then, historiographical directions in the field of gender/ed history have grown in exciting ways. This chapter focuses primarily on new scholarship since 2005; for a fine analysis of the historiography of gender and modernity until that point—and after—including extensive and helpful citations of works in the endnotes, see Vera Mackie’s 2013 essay in the Journal of Women’s History (2013). Our use of the gerund “gendering” in the book’s title implied an ongoing or dynamic process, and indeed growth has been dynamic. Our two major foci in 2005, finding gender in analysis of modernity and tearing down—or at least challenging— dominant narratives by viewing history through a gendered frame, have continued to be addressed in works published after Gendering Modern Japanese History and have been joined by numerous other categories. Histories focusing on gendered modernities from the late nineteenth into the twentieth centuries have proliferated. These are primarily cultural in orientation, while also addressing political issues (see Sato 2003; Silverberg 2006; Freedman 2010; Germer et al. 2014; Freedman et al. 2013; and essays in Weinbaum et al. 2008). Marcia Yonemoto’s innovative monograph on women in the early modern era overturns traditional discourses on women in that era and will cause those of us who focus on the modern era to reassess our thinking about the modern turn. That is, she shows that early modern women had considerable power to influence political practice and social structure, in contradiction to official patriarchal norms. The modern demand for rights was thus grounded in early modern practices (Yonemoto 2016).

The intersections of modernity with other categories have provided useful ways of undermining dominant narratives. These include a wide range of works focusing on the intersection of modernity and consumption (Yamashita 2016; Gordon 2007; Francks and Hunter 2012; Garon and Maclachlan 2006). The intersection of gendered modernity and material culture has been highlighted in scholarship on material objects, such as sewing machines, and on domestic space (Gordon 2011; Sand 2005). Modernity’s linkage with sexualities and reproduction has produced a bourgeoning field of study, including new interpretations of the sex trades, control and manipulation of sexualities under colonialism, reproduction and contraception, and bodily liberation (Mihalopoulos 2011; Frühstück 2003; Takeda 2005; Takeuchi-Demirci 2018; Seaman 2017; Terazawa 2018; Bullock 2010). The relationship between gender, sexuality, and family structures, while itself a familiar topic, has also been readdressed in new ways in recent years (Holloway 2010; Ueno 2009; Ochiai and Molony 2008). An extraordinarily large collection of works on women’s writing builds on a field that has long been framed as explicitly gendered. A small but representative sampling of the many works published since the appearance of Gendering Modern Japanese History by historians and non-historians that contribute to our understanding of the linkage of gendered modernity and print culture includes excellent studies by Sarah Frederick (2006), Ronald P. Loftus (2004), Michiko Suzuki (2010), and Anne Walthall (2010).

One of the most exciting developments in the last quarter century is the naming of masculinity studies. Men and their activities have long been the dominant feature in most historical works. Some fine monographs and articles that specifically note that they are about men have also been part of the canon of Japanese history, though they have tended to be unmarked by gender considerations. (To be fair, women’s history in its infancy was not framed in terms of gender construction, either, but rather as compensation for women’s inexcusable absence in historiography.) Masculinities are now part of a marked category; Gendering Modern Japanese History included only 4 of 16 essays on masculinities, a proportion representative of the field of gender history at that time. Recent works that subject masculinity to gender scrutiny are too numerous to mention in their entirety, but a few by the following authors give a taste of the growing field: historical monographs by Jason G. Karlin (2014) and Sabine Frühstück (2007); pathbreaking collections edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (2011) and by Kam Louie and Morris Low (2003); several studies that focus on changing masculinities in the contemporary era, including works by Romit Dasgupta (2012) and James E. Roberson and Nobue Suzuki’s edited collection (2003); and Mire Koikari’s recent work on re-masculinizing Japan in the wake of the tragic 3.11 disaster (2017).

LGBTQ history has become an extraordinarily fertile field. Several important collections of essays or documents cover a variety of historical aspects of LGBTQ as well as contemporary issues. These include collections edited by Mark McLelland and Vera Mackie (2014); Mark McLelland et al. (2015); Mark McLelland et al. (2007); Sharon Chalmers (2002); Fred Martin, Peter A. Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue (2008); and Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta (2015). Articles and monographs are numerous as well, including those by Claire Maree (2007) and Mark McLelland (2005). This listing does not do the field justice; numerous additional articles and monographs round out this field.

Economic history is one of the foundational “dominant narrative” areas of research that has also been shaken up in recent decades by framing it in terms of gender. Works on the intersection of modernity and the economy can no longer fail to be viewed through the lens of gender, especially when we consider labour and household issues. Scholars who have addressed these issues in recent years include Janet Hunter (2003), Sheldon Garon (2013), Christopher Gerteis (2010), Helen Macnaughtan (2005, 2015a, 2015b), Ayako Kano, and Vera Mackie (2012, 2013).

Gender has also deeply permeated migration studies. An important examination of gendered migration in the 1974 movie Sandakan No. 8 (Sandakan hachiban shōkan bōkyō, Kumai Kei) based on Yamazaki Tomoko’s historical recreation of Japanese women in the overseas sex trades (1975) was one of the first gendered works available to Anglophone audiences. Thus, we see that treatment of gendered diasporas and migrations has a 50-year history in women’s studies. Recent works focus not only on Japanese overseas migration in the sex trades (Mihalopoulos 2011; Oharazeki 2016) but also on migrant Asian women trafficked in Japan today (Aoyama 2011; Parreñas 2011).

Another area that that been radically modified by its engendering is diplomatic history. Gender, diplomacy, and foreign relations, especially but not exclusively during the Occupation (1945–1952) and Cold War eras, have been addressed by Mire Koikari (2008, 2015), Sarah Kovner (2012), Naoko Shibusawa (2006), John Dower (1999), Jan Bardsley (2014), Akiko Takenaka (2016), and Mark McLelland (2012, 2017). And, finally, two other areas that have been long considered part of the dominant historical narrative, law and politics, have been greatly enhanced by seeing them through the lens of gender and modernity. Monographs by Harald Fuess (2004) and Robin LeBlanc (2010) and a collection edited by Susan L. Burns and Barbara J. Brooks (2014) are important additions to the study of law and politics. Scholarship on the creation of gendered law under pressure from women’s movements and government self-interest has been cogently redefined in the past decade as state feminism, with new works by Miriam Murase (2006), Yoshie Kobayashi (2004), and Ayako Kano (2016).

Those cited previously are just the tip of the iceberg of works in the fields I have defined here, and most of these works easily fall into more than one of these categories. For example, Karlin’s Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan, which I have included as a work that historicizes the linkage of masculinity and modernity, could also be placed in the cultural modernities section, as it takes the opposite track from Gendering Modern Japanese History in its insightful focus on the losers under modernity. My categories here all have permeable boundaries. For the most part, I have not included the extraordinary profusion of journal articles nor pulled out individual essays from excellent collections; only some of these many excellent works are mentioned here.

Gender/ed history has been vastly expanded by focus on paradigms we did not highlight in our “Introduction,” though many of us employed them in our published works. One of the most important of those categories we left unmarked is the historical study of feminisms. We did not emphasize this as a primary category in the “Introduction,” perhaps because it seemed to some critics at the time to represent an old-fashioned dominant narrative itself (albeit within the marginalized field of women’s history). Moreover, a critical re-examination, beginning in the 1980s, of the activities of Japanese feminists during World War II somewhat diminished the attractiveness of the study of feminisms and feminists at that time. The questioning of the study of feminism initially arose because several Japanese historians strongly criticized feminists’ support for their government during wartime, especially in light of the exposure during the 1970s and 1980s of the oppression of wartime “comfort women” (see Soh 2008; Molony et al. 2016). Since then, new directions in the study of feminisms have emerged. Some scholars have now merged studies of imperialism, feminism, and modernity. In a recent work, Mark Driscoll offers a particularly innovative way of addressing violence, gender, modernity in the metropole, and feminism (2010). Other scholars who worked on gendered colonial modernity are Donald Smith (2006), Barbara Molony (2017a), and Noriko J. Horiguchi (2012).

Historians like Suzuki Yūko (1986) and Kanō Mikiyo (1987) took to task both feminist leaders and average women—designating the latter as the “home front”—for not actively opposing a government that carried out gendered violence. Leading feminist scholar and sociologist Ueno Chizuko analyzed this late twentieth-century historiographical turn in her critique of nationalism and feminism, originally published in Japanese and translated as Nationalism and Gender in 2004. The bitterness of this issue has subsided in recent decades, not because the issue of war responsibility has disappeared but rather because Japanese feminists’ wartime activities have become the widely accepted interpretation in works by feminist historians (see Germer 2006, 2013a, 2013b; Wilson 2006). Some historians have begun to disentangle the indisputable support for the war—or silent complicity—by most of the Japanese population, including feminists who sought inclusion in the state, from guilt associated with sexual violence against other Asian women under Japanese imperialism. I have begun, but by no means completed, an examination of the minds of Japanese feminists, many of whom likely knew about the comfort women but said little or nothing. Was their complicity a case of “inattentional blindness”—that is, did they casually observe but not truly see because they were blinded by other wartime issues that seemed at the moment more important, or because they held classist attitudes about women in sex work, whether voluntary or coerced (Molony 2017b)?

Ironically, the critical re-examination of feminism, rather than suppressing the field, has revitalized it, and the history of feminisms has reemerged as an exceptionally exciting field of analysis by both historians and historically oriented scholars trained in other fields. What is particularly exciting is that the analysis of feminism has expanded beyond the middle of the twentieth century and addresses very recent history as well. Vera Mackie’s Feminism in Modern Japan (2003) remains the book of record in the field of feminist history, and her work has been joined by outstanding recent works by historians and historically oriented non-historians— (Mackie 1997), Julia Bullock, Ayako Kano, James Welker (2018), and Elyssa Faison (2007)—among others who have built powerful new tools for examining the architecture of historical feminisms. Works on historical feminisms before 1945 by Elizabeth Dorn Lublin (2010), Marnie Anderson (2010), Mara Patessio (2011), Hiroko Tomida (2004; Tomida and Daniels 2005), Jan Bardsley (2007), Teruko Craig (see Hiratsuka 2006), Dina Lowy (2007), and Mariko Tamanoi (2009) have given us a much deeper insight into the motivations and contexts of feminist movements during those years. Many of these were transnational feminist movements, a category that I will develop more fully subsequently. Breakthrough works on feminisms in the last two decades by Setsu Shigematsu (2012) and Laura Dales (2009) have also taken us in new directions.

Other paradigms that are central to feminist scholarship but have not always been explicitly designated as such in the Japan field are transnationalism and intersectionality. And yet both, especially transnationalism, have been central to Japanese feminist praxis for the past century. The identified categories of transnational and intersectional feminist studies have a more recent history and were first named in Western scholarship (see Molony and Nelson 2017). Discussions about the relationship between feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and transnationalism began to emerge globally in the late 1980s and 1990s and consolidate into a field...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Contributor biographies
• Note on the romanization of Japanese
• Introduction: gender and culture in Japan today
• Part I Theorizing and historicizing gender and Japanese culture
• Part II Home, family, and the “private sphere”
• Part III Work, politics, and the “public sphere”
• Part IV Cultures of play: leisure, music, and performance
• Part V Cultural production: literature, cinema, and popular culture
• Part VI Texts and contexts: case studies
• Index