Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams
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Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams
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Overview
In exploring the promises, limitations, and contradictions of these “occidental longings,” Women on the Verge exposes the racial and erotic politics of transnational mobility. Kelsky shows how female cosmopolitanism recontextualizes the well-known Western male romance with the Orient: Japanese women are now the agents, narrating their own desires for the “modern” West in ways that seem to defy Japanese nationalism as well as long-standing relations of power not only between men and women but between Japan and the West. While transnational movement is not available to all Japanese women, Kelsky shows that the desire for the foreign permeates many Japanese women’s lives. She also reveals how this feminine allegiance to the West—and particularly to white men—can impose its own unanticipated hegemonies of race, sexuality, and capital.
Combining ethnography and literary analysis, and bridging anthropology and cultural studies, Women on the Verge will also appeal to students and scholars of Japan studies, feminism, and global culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822383277 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2001 |
| Series: | Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Karen Kelsky is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon.
Read an Excerpt
Women on the Verge
Japanese Women, Western DreamsBy KAREN KELSKY
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2001 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2816-2
Chapter One
The Promised Land: A Genealogy of Female Internationalism
In the history of Japan's official contact with the West, Japanese women have played a minor role. A surprising number, however, emerge on the margins of the official encounters, serving over the past 150 years as informal, sometimes unwilling, mediators between a globally emergent Japan and the West. One of the first such women was Okichi, the "native wife" given over by the Japanese government to the first American consul to Japan, Townsend Harris, after his arrival in 1856. Over the years Okichi has been sanctified as the martyred symbol of Tokugawa-era Japan's subjection to American imperialist penetration into the Japanese national body (Leupp 1993, 10). Indeed, Okichi was not the first woman so offered; she followed in the wake of the Deshima prostitutes provided by the Tokugawa government on behalf of the Dutch traders who were confined to the island of Deshima during Japan's nearly three hundred years of Tokugawa-era isolation. Okichi was in turn followed by the rashamen, the mistresses of foreigners in the late Tokugawa treaty ports. As John Dower writes, "Enlisting a small number of women to serve as a buffer protecting the chastity ofthe 'good' women of Japan was well-established policy in dealing with Western barbarians" (1999, 126).
However, Japan's encounter with the West after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 yielded many more opportunities for an increasing number of merchant- and upper-class women to encounter firsthand the West and Westerners, particularly Americans, in elite educational or professional settings. These encounters profoundly altered women's own interpretations of their position in the family and nation and provided for the first time a comparative foundation for a gendered perspective on Japan. Such women include Tsuda Umeko (and other early female government-sponsored students to the United States), who used her American education, English fluency, and foreign contacts to found one of the first Japanese women's colleges; Sugimoto Etsu, whose lengthy residence in the United States during the last years of the Meiji era inspired an oeuvre of writing in English on the status of Japanese women; Kato (Ishimoto) Shizue, who championed Margaret Sanger and Western birth control practices in the Taisho and early Showa periods, and later became one of Japan's first female elected officials to the House of Representatives; hundreds of women students benefiting from a variety of public and private scholarship sources to study in the United States in the prewar and postwar periods; and finally, the thousands of women who, as employees, associates, friends, lovers, or future wives of U.S. Occupation soldiers, encountered the United States firsthand in ways that profoundly altered their own lives and helped shape the postwar relations between the two countries.
To be sure, each of these encounters occurred in its own specific historical, social, economic, political, and cultural context. Tsuda Umeko and the other early female study-abroad students were samurai daughters, educated at Japanese government expense in an effort to bring Japanese women in line with current Western standards of women's education. Kato Shizue and Sugimoto Etsu were aristocratic women who took upon themselves the role of intercultural interpreters to foster "international understanding" and Japan's democratization. The Deshima prostitutes, Okichi, and the official Occupation comfort women, by contrast, were generally lower-class women conscripted by the Japanese government as a "female floodwall" between "good" Japanese women and the invading foreign hordes (Molasky 1999, 105). Many of the other women involved, professionally or personally, with the Occupation were relatively well-educated middle-class women chosen by Westerners as the individuals most appropriate to represent their nation for rehabilitation, willing and eager democratic subjects who were singled out as the "best hope" of Japan after the treachery of Japanese men. As each encounter is situated within specific historical configurations, these women's lives certainly cannot be reduced to one homogeneous paradigm.
Yet, taken together, these and other encounters have established a precedent-certainly a varied and ambiguous precedent, but a precedent nonetheless-for women to be thought of and to think of themselves as claiming a special experience with, and intimacy with, the broadly conceived entity called "the West," and the United States in particular. The result has been the emergence of a women's discourse about the West/ United States as a site of salvation from what they characterize as a feudalistic and oppressive patriarchal Japanese family system. This discourse posits an alliance between Japanese women and Westerners/Americans against both that system and the Japanese men who they suggest created it and benefit most from it. In part because of the sexual nature of the earliest contacts, this alliance between Japanese women and Westerners/Americans has had an enduring erotic tone. In turn, this perceived alliance has brought about an ambivalent response from Japanese men to the specter of the West as a threat to "traditional" Japanese gender relations and the purity of the Japanese woman/nation.
This chapter looks at each of these outcomes in the context of four different moments of encounter between Japanese women and the United States: Tsuda Umeko as Japan's first female study-abroad student; wartime female internationalism in the work of writer Mishima Sumie; the gendered politics of the U.S. Occupation period (1945-1952); and what Johnson (1988) has called the "sexual nexus" of the United States and Japan during and after the Occupation. At each point I trace women's narrativization of the United States, and by extension the West at large, as "promised land" and agent of their rescue from the oppressiveness of Japanese tradition. I will juxtapose these texts with men's writings of the time to highlight the gendered conventions of internationalism that have come to be so influential in the present day. My purpose is not to provide an exhaustive historical survey of these encounters, but to sketch a genealogy of contemporary akogare: the vocabulary of desire for the United States and the West as site of women's escape and redemption in fact and in fantasy.
Tsuda Umeko and Women's Study Abroad In December 1871, Tsuda Umeko (1864-1929), the seven-year-old daughter of former samurai and government interpreter Tsuda Sen, was sent abroad with four other girls ages eight to fifteen to be educated in America. They made this journey only eleven years after the first official Japanese embassy visited the United States in 1860. They were the first-and for a long time the last-Japanese women to receive an education abroad. This extraordinary venture was the result of an initiative by a coalition of early Meiji male reformers who, anxious to appear civilized in the eyes of the rapidly encroaching Western imperialist nations, particularly the United States, felt it imperative to "raise up" Japanese womanhood in education, refinement, and social status to the level of American women. Only when Japanese women had been lifted from their condition of feudal servitude, it was widely believed, could they begin to function as wise mothers, true guardians of the home, and, thus, caretakers of the nation's future. As Rose writes, "Like many people on both sides of the globe, [progressive men] assumed that one key to Western success was its 'home life,' and that Japan's lack of progress could thus be explained in part by its low estimation of women" (1992, 8).
Tsuda and her compatriots set sail for America charged by their government and empress to acquire the attainments of American women and return to Japan prepared to serve their countrywomen as models of female achievement. Two of the girls fell ill and returned home almost immediately, but Tsuda and two others remained in the United States for over ten years. Because the other two, on their return to Japan, married and became relatively cloistered wives of the aristocracy, in the end it fell to Tsuda almost single-handedly to carry out the lonely, difficult, and by then unpopular task of raising the educational standards for women in Japan. As one of her students was to write of her later, "If Miss Tsuda had wished to lead a life of ease, she could have done so. She was a beautiful young girl, and among a certain group of the upper-class Japanese there was a great tendency to admire Western things. She could have made a shining figure in their society. The two other girls who had been educated in the United States had married great military officers, one eventually becoming a princess and the other a baroness.... But [Tsuda] could not close her eyes to the millions and millions of Japanese women suffering because of their helplessness" (Mishima S. 1941, 65).
In the United States Tsuda was taken in to the household of Charles Lanman, the Secretary of the Japanese High Commission in Washington, D.C., and his wife Adeline. With no children of their own, the Lanmans raised Tsuda as their own daughter, and the bonds among the three were exceedingly deep, lasting until their deaths. Tsuda completed elementary, junior high, and high school in the United States and was so thoroughly absorbed into American life during the eleven years that she spent with the Lanmans (from age seven to eighteen) that she entirely lost her Japanese language ability and a large portion of her cultural knowledge of Japan. In one of her first letters to Mrs. Lanman on her return, she wrote, "Still I feel so strange, like a tree that is transplanted.... How much to keep of American ways, and how much to go back, and so often I wonder how I am going to do any good to my country-women, and how I must begin. The way is dark and dreary" (November 23, 1882; in Furuki et al. 1991, 18-19).
Indeed, Tsuda was to spend the seven years from her return to Japan in 1882 until her second departure for university study at Bryn Mawr in 1889 in a frustrating and nearly fruitless search for employment. The spirit of reform had died during her absence from Japan, and by the time of her return, support for women's education was scant, despite the efforts of reformers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, inspired by the writings of J. S. Mill, to raise Japanese women's status (see Kiyooka 1988; Hoshino 1929). Retreating to a renewed emphasis on female domesticity and obedience, the government had no use for Tsuda's educational attainments, although it did not hesitate to produce her "as a convenient example of Japan's progressive attitude toward women in speeches and articles intended for Western consumption" (Sievers 1983, 13). The Ministry of Education consistently ignored her letters announcing her return (Rose 1992, 49), and she was reduced to caring for her numerous younger siblings at her family's run-down farmhouse in the countryside. Far from being encouraged to mobilize on women's behalf, she was increasingly pressured by family and friends to marry and conform to traditional expectations of womanly duties. This she opposed with all her might: "Just think how absurd it does seem," she wrote to the Lanmans, her lifelong correspondents. "It is too dreadful, but as I feel now I would not marry ... nothing would induce me to make a regular Japanese marriage where anything but love is regarded" (January 16, 1883; in Furuki et al. 1991, 33-34). Later, harassed from all sides, she insisted in a letter to Mrs. Lanman, "Please don't write marriage to me again, not once. I am so sick of the subject, sick of hearing about it, and discussing it. I am not going to marry unless I want to. I will not let circumstances or anybody force me into it." Poignantly, though, she follows this with, "It is so hard, so very hard, to get along alone. Oh it is so hard to feel yourself as different from others, and be looked on with contempt" (June 6, 1883; 75).
Tsuda abhorred the social position of Japanese women, particularly married women, who could not hold property in their own name and were considered "incompetents" under the law. The prevailing views on women that she confronted were summarized by Hoshino Ai, one of her students, and the second president of Tsuda College:
It is better for women that they should not be educated, because their lot throughout life must be in perfect obedience; and the way to salvation is only through the path of three obediences-obedience to a father when yet unmarried, to a husband when married, and to a son when widowed. What is the use of developing the mind of a woman or training the power of her judgment, when her life is to be guided at every step by a man? Yet it is highly important that she should be morally trained, so that she be always gentle and chaste, never giving way to passion inconvenient to others, nor questioning the authority of her elders. For her no religion is necessary, because her husband is her sole heaven, and in serving him and his lies her whole duty. (1929, 215)
"My heart goes out to Japanese women," Tsuda wrote to Adeline Lanman only a few months after arriving, "and I burn with indignation at their position, while I blame them too.... Oh, Mrs. Lanman, you can not know how I feel!! No one can understand, either in America or here.... Change seems so utterly impossible. It is so rooted and ground into them" (May 23, 1883; in Furuki et al. 1991, 69).
As a result of these disillusionments, Tsuda became more than ever convinced of the superiority of women's status in the United States. She wrote within a few months to the Lanmans, "If every woman in America is not thankful for her lot, she is ungrateful to God. Thankful for her strong mind, ideas, strength of decision, and the kindnesses she receives, and her position, socially" (May 23, 1883; in Furuki et al. 1991, 70). She began to dream of opening a women's college in Japan modeled after American women's schools. Her prospects, however, were dim given her lack of financial resources and official Japan's intensifying hostility toward higher education for women. Finally she received a prestigious post as teacher at the Peeress's School, the highest-ranked girls' school in Japan, established to educate the daughters of the imperial family and the nobility. But after a time she became disillusioned with the aristocratic girls, who were trained at the school, as one former student later recalled, only to "become obedient wives, good mothers, and loyal guardians of the family system" (Ishimoto 1984, 53). When Tsuda, after four years at the Peeress's School, was given the opportunity to pursue advanced study at Bryn Mawr, she gladly departed.
This period in the United States was, by her own account, the most joyful period of Tsuda's life, surrounded as she was by serious, intellectually passionate women in a young college (founded only four years earlier) run entirely by women. Furuki writes, "It was the Americans who finally recognized and promoted Tsuda's natural talents" (1992, 124). However, when she was offered the opportunity to remain at Bryn Mawr permanently as a researcher in her newly chosen field of biology, she declined, devoting her third and final year in the United States to fundraising among American donors for her planned American-style women's college in Japan (Yamazaki Takako 1989, 39-40). This was not because a life of research in this congenial environment held no allure for her; rather, precisely because her American experience had proven so liberating, she returned determined, in the words of Hoshino Ai, "to have a college of her own where she could share with Japanese girls what she had been given so abundantly in America" (1929, 14).
After her return and resumption of teaching duties at the Peeress's School in 1892, Tsuda increasingly addressed her pleas on behalf of Japanese women to foreign audiences, convinced that both moral and financial support for her educational vision was to be forthcoming only from foreign sources. Western women and men were to be her allies in challenging the recalcitrant men of the government. There was precedence for this view, in that it had been foreign advisors such as David Murray, as early as 1872, who had first encouraged Meiji leaders to improve women's education. For decades Christian mission schools, run primarily by American missionaries and funded by donations from the United States, offered the only higher educational opportunities open to ambitious young women in Japan.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xi
Note on Japanese Names and Terms xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Promised Land: A Genealogy of Female Internationalism 35
2. Internationalism as Resistance 85
3. Capital and the Fetish of the White Man 133
4. (Re)flexibility in Inflexible Places 202
Conclusion: Strange Bedfellows 227
Notes 249
Bibliography 259
Index 283