Feminism in Japan

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History

Feminism in Japan
Barbara Molony
Subject: Gender, Japan Online Publication Date: Jan 2018
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.194

Summary and Keywords

Japan’s first movement for civil rights emerged in the 1870s, and a small number of
women were part of it. Women’s legal status was significantly inferior to men’s in the
pre–World War II era, and feminists struggled for decades to improve it. Their activism in
transnational organizations often gave them a voice they did not have at home. For
example, the Japanese branch of the International Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
worked to end international sex trafficking, licensed prostitution, and marital inequality.
The Japanese cultural world took a feminist turn in the second decade of the 20th
century. Increasing numbers of women entered the classroom as teachers, nurses served
on the battlefield and in hospitals, and actresses performed in plays like A Doll’s House.
Many of these women were called “New Women,” and an explicitly women’s rights
organization, founded in 1919, called itself the New Woman’s Association.

When the Tokyo earthquake killed 100,000 people and destroyed millions of homes in
1923, women’s organizations of all types—Christian, Buddhist, alumnae, housewives, and
socialists—coalesced to carry out earthquake relief. The following year, several of those
groups decided to address women’s political rights. The Women’s Suffrage League grew
from this collaboration in 1924. Annual Women’s Suffrage Conferences brought together
women of diverse organizations from 1930 to 1937. In the 1920s and early 1930s,
Japanese feminists also made their voices heard through transnational organizations,
including the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Young Women’s
Christian Association, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Pan-Pacific
Women’s Association. When Japanese militarism at home and abroad repressed freedom
of expression in the 1930s, feminist groups continued to meet, turning to community
activism (like improving municipal utilities) and nonthreatening feminist legislation (the
Mother-Child Protection Law of 1937). During World War II, many feminists accepted
government advisory positions to improve the lives of women and families, viewing this as
a step toward greater political integration. By the 1980s, however, feminists strongly
critiqued prewar feminists for collaboration with the wartime government.

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Feminism in Japan

Women voted for the first time in 1946. In 1947, the new Constitution granted equal
rights, the new Civil Code eradicated most of the patriarchal provisions of the 1898 Civil
Code, and the Labor Standards Law called for equal pay for equal work. Nevertheless,
women continued to face discrimination in the workplace, at home, and even in the law.
Feminists supported the United Nations International Women’s Year (1975) with vigor.
Since then, they have successfully advocated for strengthened employment and child-care
leave laws as well as anti–domestic violence laws. But gender-neutral legislation has been
hotly contested and has led to a backlash against feminism in general.

Keywords: Japan, feminism, women’s suffrage, New Women, transnational feminism, employment equality, women
in World War II, sexuality, family, Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society

Gender and Rights: Creating a New Society

After Japan’s Meiji Restoration (1868), government and private-sector leaders as well as
average people throughout the country developed new discourses of citizenship, created
new economic systems, redefined relations with the outside world, and studied and
selectively borrowed ideas from abroad. The government was also interested in the
construction of new types of citizen/subjects to serve the new nation. For the first time,
some Japanese in the 1870s and 1880s felt liberated to voice their opinions in public
discussions, and some of those were women who articulated their views using the
discourses of rights developed in the West during the previous century.

The earliest advocates for women’s rights were part of the larger People’s Rights
Movement, most of whose participants were men. One of the first women to demand
“rights” was Kusunose Kita (1833–1892), a 45-year-old widowed household head who, in
1878, petitioned for the right to vote in local elections, a right enjoyed by male property
owners. Women’s rights advocates, who called her the “People’s Rights Grandma,”
contended that she should not be taxed without representation. She protested the use of
gender in establishing an individual’s relationship to the state. Kusunose failed to gain
the vote in 1878, but women began to advocate for danjo dōken (male–female equal
rights) and joken (women’s rights).

Fearful of the People’s Rights Movement, the government imposed press censorship laws
in 1875. Verbal expression was also restricted in the early decades of the Meiji period. In
1883 Kishida Toshiko (1861?–1901), a feminist orator and People’s Rights member, was
arrested for publicly calling for women’s rights. Kishida inspired women all over Japan.
Thousands heard her proclaim that women’s equality in society and the family was an
indicator of civilization and that equality would elevate Japan in international eyes. After
her arrest, Kishida soon abandoned public speaking for essay writing—mainly in the
feminist journal Jogaku zasshi (Women’s Education Magazine)—and teaching. One of
those inspired by Kishida was Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927). Fukuda created a women’s
organization to showcase women’s rights speakers, for which the authorities punished
her by shutting down the school she and her mother had established. This did not stop

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her. In the first decade of the 20th century (which encompassed the Russo-Japanese War
[1904–1905] and the early years of Japanese imperialism), she worked with antiwar and
socialist men and women and was the founding editor (in 1907) of the feminist newspaper
Sekai fujin (Women of the World).

Japan’s new constitution of 1889, the first such document outside of Europe and the
Americas, stipulated that civil rights could be limited by law. The government began
creating those limits immediately. In 1890, women were prohibited from joining political
parties or attending political rallies, thereby denying them the rights of speech and
assembly. This prohibition was reinforced in 1900 under the Public Peace Police Law.
Repealing that law’s infamous Article 5, which restricted women’s rights, was a major
focus of women’s activism for the next two decades. By the end of the 1890s, women’s
rights were further limited by the Civil Code, which subordinated all members of a
household (ie) to the (male) head of household.

Supporters of women’s rights expressed profound disappointment with the gendered

legal restrictions on rights. Novelist Shimizu Toyoko (1868–1933) articulated these
sentiments in her article, “To My Beloved Sisters in Tears,” published in Jogaku zasshi in
1890. Members of the Japan Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU), founded in
1886 as a branch of the transnational WCTU, were also distressed by the codification of
inequality but recognized that women’s activist options were limited by Article 5. The
JWCTU’s focus on social and moral reforms, including movements against licensed
prostitution and concubinage, appeared less overtly political to the authorities. (Japanese
men were legally allowed just one wife, but many also had concubines, who had legal
status within the family for several decades before the adoption of the Civil Code in
1898.) These movements were therefore within the bounds of the law. Moreover, the
Christian organizations that supported these reforms framed them in the patriotic terms
of elevating the status of the nation by improving the status of women.

Other advocates for women’s rights joined antiwar and socialist movements. One group of
women within a larger socialist and Christian organization that had opposed the Russo-
Japanese War petitioned the Diet in 1907 to take up the question of amending Article 5 to
allow women to speak and assemble publicly. Though they failed to change the law, their
activities were chronicled in Fukuda Hideko’s Sekai fujin. Another important feminist who
expressed antiwar sentiments during the Russo-Japanese War was the poet Yosano Akiko
(1878–1942), one of Japan’s leading literary figures. Her famous poem begged her
brother not to fight. “Brother, do not give your life,” she wrote. “His Majesty the Emperor
goes not himself into the battle.” Yosano changed her views in the years leading up to
World War II, when she supported Japan’s military enthusiastically.

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Feminism in Japan

New Women, Modern Girls, and the

Motherhood Protection Debate
From the 1910s through the 1930s, many Japanese women were experimenting with new
ways of self-representation. In the 1910s, they were called—and called themselves—New
Women. In the mid-1920s, a new type of modern woman emerged—the Modern Girl
(modan gāru, also abbreviated as moga). Japan’s New Woman and Modern Girl were both
part of global phenomena.

New Women entered the scene in 1911 in the form of Nora, the protagonist of Henrik
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. As in the West, the play led to an outpouring of media
commentary about Nora as an archetypal New Woman. The same month, Hiratsuka
Raichō (1886–1972) launched her new organization, the Bluestockings, and its magazine
of the same name, Seitō (Bluestocking). Hiratsuka’s famous “Feminist Manifesto”
appeared in the first issue of Seitō in 1911: “In the beginning, woman was the sun”
evoked the powerful image of the Sun Goddess, the mythical founder of Japan’s imperial
family, in its call for women to retrieve their lost genius. Critics of the Bluestockings
called Hiratsuka and her colleagues “Japanese Noras”—New Women who were frivolous
and self-absorbed in their quest for self-awareness.

From 1911 to 1916, Seitō published articles on chastity, abortion, and prostitution in
which the writers debated one another in strongly worded essays that used strikingly
contemporary-sounding language. Should women remain chaste, even if doing so might
lead to one’s family’s destitution? Was a fetus a separate human or was it part of a
woman’s body over which she should have control? Was prostitution slavery or a social
necessity to serve “men’s inherent needs”?

Mass circulation periodicals aimed at a general audience also ran articles about New
Women. While some asserted that New Women denied their true womanly nature, many
others discussed, in positive terms, women in modern occupations like teaching, office
work, and medicine and the importance of women’s education. Another progressive
women’s organization, which some in the media depicted as a rival to the Bluestockings,
was the True New Women’s Association (Shinshinfujinkai). Both the Bluestockings and
the True New Women claimed the title of New Women, and members of these and other
groups went on to build the interwar domestic and transnational women’s movements.
Most immediately, the term “New Woman” was embedded in a political organization, the
New Woman’s Association, described below. Many New Women were professional writers
whose novels and short stories depicted women taking control of their own lives and
sexuality. Many wrote for Seitō, mass-circulation media, or the left-leaning feminist
literary journal Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s Arts), published from 1928 to 1932.

The term “Modern Girl” seems to have first appeared in 1923. By then, New Women were
part of Japan’s cosmopolitan, literary, and activist scene. The Modern Girl was a new
phenomenon, who first appeared as a media sensation. And yet, the Modern Girl was a
real person. She was one of the thousands of female factory workers, employees in newly
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emerging professions, retail workers in both modern department stores and tiny retail
shops, bus conductors and telephone operators, café waitresses, highly trained
employees in teaching, medicine, and other sectors, and privileged young women who
could easily afford international products and fashions. As a media sensation, the Modern
Girl was transgressive. Common criticisms focused on her supposed foreignness,
frivolousness, and promiscuity. Both Marxist and conservative critics called Modern Girls
“hedonistic” and “decadent.” Most, however, were hardworking employees with working-
class or middle-class jobs.

Toward the end of World War I, the Bluestockings’ Hiratsuka was one of several leading
feminists engaged in the “Motherhood Protection Debate.” She was joined by poet Yosano
Akiko, socialist feminist Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980), and rescued Seattle sex-worker-
turned-feminist-translator Yamada Waka (1879–1957). The debate was conducted through
approximately 115 articles in a variety of women’s and general audience journals. Yosano,
who gave birth to thirteen children and raised eleven to adulthood, fired the opening
charge, claiming that women should not marry and have children until they could support
them independently. Women’s liberation, she asserted, was based on their ability to
support themselves without depending on their husbands or the state, which she called
“slave morality.” Hiratsuka replied that Yosano, a very successful poet, could not speak
for poor women, who, she said, were not paid well enough to support themselves
independently. Instead, Hiratsuka asserted, the state should support mothers—that is,
“protect them”—because they performed an essential service to the nation-state by
producing children. Yamakawa wrote that socialist revolution was the only way to
produce the changes in social conditions necessary to protect mothers. Yamada’s view
was consistent with the state-supported “good wife, wise mother” philosophy; she
claimed that it was the “sacred mission of women” to educate their children for the sake
of the state and to be supported by their husbands or the state. In the end, the four
women acknowledged that they all cared about improving the status of women and
mothers.

Domestic and Transnational Roots of Interwar

Japanese Feminism
Working with transnational women’s organizations gave Japanese women in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries a space for influencing state policy in the absence of civil rights
at home. Transnationalism took many forms, embracing feminisms of various sorts
beginning in the Meiji period. By the interwar years (1910s–1930s), Japanese women in
global Christian organizations like the YWCA and the WCTU played important roles in
articulating feminist theories of citizenship as well as the foundation of movements for
labor and social justice, consumer rights, and reproductive rights. At the same time that
women in transnational Christian organizations were working to improve the lives of
women at home and abroad, secular feminists were intensifying their efforts for greater
rights in these areas as well.

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Feminism in Japan

The most notable 20th-century secular suffragist was Ichikawa Fusae (1893–1981). Born
in a farming village to a family where her father encouraged his sons’ and daughters’
education but violently abused her mother, Ichikawa started her life of activism by
leading her college classmates’ protest against the gender-defined curriculum for female
students. Following jobs as a schoolteacher and as a journalist, Ichikawa settled in Tokyo
in 1918, where she signed up for English lessons with Yamada Kakichi, Yamada Waka’s
husband. She met not only Waka, but also Hiratsuka Raichō, who was also Kakichi’s
student. This meeting led Hiratsuka, already a famous feminist, to ask Ichikawa, the
general secretary of the women’s division of the labor organization Yūaikai (Friendly
Society), to introduce her to women textile workers so she could learn about their labor
conditions. Shortly thereafter, in November 1919, they founded the Shin fujin Kyōkai
(New Woman’s Association, hereafter NWA). Ichikawa and Hiratsuka recruited Oku
Mumeo (1895–1997) as the third leader of the NWA.

In January 1920, the NWA leaders met with activist women journalists and labor
organizers and decided to petition the Diet for two changes to Japanese law. The NWA
knew their first task had to be amending Article 5. The second petition concerned
Japanese family law, which turned out to be much harder to change than the law
concerning political inclusion. Hiratsuka was most interested in petitioning for a law
requiring that men be tested for syphilis before marrying. Had this law passed—it failed—
it would have given women the right that they did not have in the patriarchal family
system at that time to terminate a marriage or engagement.

In 1921, the NWA expanded its demands, calling for women’s suffrage. That same year,
however, tensions were developing within the NWA over Hiratsuka’s and Ichikawa’s
different ideological approaches to women’s rights. While Hiratsuka advocated the
principle of mothers’ rights (bokenshugi), Ichikawa stressed the principle of women’s
rights (jokenshugi) as the foundation for women’s citizenship. Hiratsuka and Ichikawa left
the NWA in 1921, but Oku stayed on until Article 5 was finally amended, due to her
efforts, in 1922.

After achieving a partial victory for women’s rights, Oku Mumeo turned her attention to
helping working women and women as consumers. She worked with suffragists on
motherhood issues and with socialists on labor issues. In 1921, socialist women, including
Yamakawa Kikue, established the Sekirankai (Red Wave Society). Around the same time,
Japanese women peace activists, many of them involved in transnational Christian
movements—like their sisters in North America, Australia, Europe, and China—linked
peace advocacy and women’s rights. In 1921, Christian women founded the Fujin Heiwa
Kyōkai (Women’s Peace Association), which later became the Japanese affiliate of the
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Members included both
secular activists and members of the JWCTU and the YWCA. Also in 1921, the 89-year-old
founder of the JWCTU, Yajima Kajiko, hand-delivered a petition for peace signed by
10,224 Japanese women to American President Warren Harding at the Washington Naval
Conference. JWCTU members took additional steps to claim a space in governance
through transnational ties in 1924; when the United States outlawed Japanese

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immigration that year, JWCTU members contacted American WCTU members to lobby on
behalf of their humiliated nation. They also went straight to Secretary of State Charles
Evans Hughes.

Women in transnational feminist organizations were also turning to more explicitly

suffragist platforms. Gauntlett Tsune (1873–1953), one of the JWCTU delegates to the
World WCTU meeting in 1920, attended the meeting of the International Woman Suffrage
Alliance in Geneva at the invitation of IWSA President Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947).
Gauntlett’s primary interest at that time was the international peace movement, and Catt
persuaded her that women’s suffrage was the way to advance peace. Gauntlett returned
to Japan, where her new advocacy for suffrage was eagerly supported by Kubushiro
Ochimi (1882–1972), secretary of the JWCTU. In July 1921, Kubushiro argued for votes
for women in an article in the JWCTU’s journal and, together with Gauntlett, founded the
Nihon fujin Sanseiken Kyōkai (Japan Women’s Suffrage Association).

Ichikawa had left the NWA in 1921, traveling to the United States, where she deepened
her knowledge of the diversity of Western feminisms through meetings with numerous
leading feminists, including Jane Addams (1860–1935) and, especially, Alice Paul (1885–
1977), proponent of the complete political equality position in American feminism. Paul
exerted the strongest influence on Ichikawa. Ichikawa enjoyed her time in the United
States, but following the devastating earthquake that killed over 150,000 people in the
Tokyo area on September 1, 1923, she returned home. She arrived in early 1924, having
been hired to work on women’s issues by the International Labour Organization. She also
joined women from across the political spectrum who had created the Tokyo Rengō
Fujinkai (Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations) at the end of September 1923 to
carry out earthquake relief. One of the divisions of this federation was its “government
section,” which began to work on women’s rights while carrying out earthquake relief. In
December 1924, government-section head Kubushiro Ochimi invited Ichikawa to join her
in launching what became Japan’s leading suffrage group, the Fusen Kakutoku Dōmei
(Women’s Suffrage League; hereafter WSL). Members of the WSL included teachers,
journalists, writers, housewives, and workers.

From Earthquake Reconstruction to the

Manchurian Incident
During the first national election (in 1928) after the passage of universal male suffrage in
1925, the WSL campaigned for fourteen House of Representatives candidates who
supported women’s rights. Seven of them were successful. Until 1931, the number of
parliamentary supporters of women’s rights continued to grow rapidly. Feminists called
these years “a period of hope.” From March 1928 to December 1929, the WSL joined with
five other women’s groups, four of them affiliated with proletarian movements such as
labor unions, to create the Fusen Kakutoku Kyōdō Iinkai (Women’s Suffrage Coordinating
Committee).

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In August 1928, an eighteen-member delegation of Japanese women, including secular

and Christian feminists, attended the first Pan Pacific Women’s Conference. Some
members of the delegation continued to collaborate, creating the Japan Women’s
Committee for International Relations as an affiliate of the Geneva-based Joint Standing
Committee of Women’s International Organizations. In 1930, when the heads of the major
world powers met in London for a disarmament conference, Japanese women, inspired by
Gauntlett Tsune, presented to the male delegates petitions for world peace signed by
many thousands of Japanese women. As they had almost a decade earlier, women
disenfranchised in national politics used the international stage to find their voice.

The women’s civil rights movement was advancing in the winter of 1928–1929, when the
WSL organized thirteen Tokyo-based women’s groups to gather petitions for women’s
suffrage. In 1929, Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi asked women’s groups to assist in
carrying out the government’s economic policies during the recession of the late 1920s.
In December 1929, Hamaguchi commended their actions, and pledged to support
expansion of women’s political rights.

In April 1930, the WSL convened a National Women’s Suffrage Convention, bringing
together 400 members of religious feminist groups like the YWCA and Young Women’s
Buddhist Association, secular feminist organizations, the Proletarian Women’s League,
and teachers’ organizations. A number of elected officials spoke out in support of
women’s rights at this convention. But the bills they proposed in May 1930 and February
1931 fell short of equal citizenship rights for women. These bills would have granted
women the right to vote on the municipal level but not on the prefectural or national level
and would have required married women to obtain their husbands’ approval to run for
office. Although denounced as inadequate by almost all feminists, these bills were
rejected as too radical by the conservative House of Peers. Women failed to obtain even
limited civil rights before everything changed in 1931.

In September 1931, right-wing officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army stationed in Manchuria

along the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway bombed a section of track,
instigating hostilities with Chinese soldiers in the region. This event, known as the
Manchurian Incident, set in motion Japan’s fifteen years of war on the continent. Right-
wing extremism produced a wave of domestic terror as well, some of it fueled by hatred
of modern society characterized by New Women and Modern Girls. Japan was closely tied
to Western countries through multilateral treaties and trade. The global Great Depression
triggered by the crash of Wall Street in 1929 spread to Japan, and anything transnational
was viewed as a national threat. In that context, feminism became suspect. Suffrage
legislation was not proposed again until 1945. But the suffragists were pragmatic; they
adjusted their tactics while retaining, at least until the late 1930s, their strategy of civic
engagement as the basis for improving the status of women and children.

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Feminist Activism to Protect Women’s Bodies

One of the feminists who had been involved in the Motherhood Protection Debate in the
1910s was socialist feminist Yamakawa Kikue. In 1925, she struggled unsuccessfully to
persuade the leftist union Hyōgikai to accept the formation of a women’s division to
support measures to help working mothers retain their jobs. The measures she called for
included paid maternity leave, an eight-hour workday, and equal pay for equal work.
Unfortunately, the union’s male leadership neither made efforts to promote these reforms
nor created a women’s division, although they did support women workers’ strike
demands for improved maternity leave during the late 1920s.

Women workers made other body-centered demands in the interwar period. The one most
curious to Western observers was menstruation leave. Decades later, in the 1980s, when
the Equal Employment Opportunity Law was debated in Japan, this policy was framed as
necessary to preserve working women’s future maternal health. No one recalled that the
original demand for this provision, which became part of the post–World War II Labor
Standards Law of 1947, had nothing to do with maternal health. Rather, it was based on
working women’s need to find a way to continue to work under difficult conditions related
to their bodies.

The issue of menstruation leave was first raised in 1928, when 500 women bus
conductors struck for better working conditions against the Tokyo Municipal Bus
Company. One of their key demands was menstruation leave. Bus conductors had to
spend long hours on their feet in crowded, moving buses that had no toilet facilities.
Metropolitan buses could not stop to find a toilet when a conductor might need one.
Quitting their jobs because they could not take care of their monthly period was not
possible for many women who needed work. So Tokyo’s female bus conductors demanded
several days off to accommodate this bodily function.

Feminists joined the call for menstruation leave in the late 1930s. The April and May
1937 issues of the women’s magazine Fujin kōron contained articles entitled “Let’s Have
Menstruation Leave!” Feminists from across the political spectrum voiced their support
for menstruation leave. A decade later, after Japan’s nearly complete destruction in World
War II, the demand for menstruation leave was reintroduced by women factory workers.
Cotton or rags that could be used for sanitary purposes were nonexistent or in short
supply. Most factories had no heat or clean toilets. Again, women who needed to keep
their jobs (many were war widows and orphans) required provisions that addressed their
gendered needs.

In the early 20th century, Japanese intellectuals had begun to discuss birth control as a
means of controlling overpopulation and the resulting strain on national resources. In
1922, with the visit of American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879–1966),
reproductive control was taken up by feminists as a way of helping all women, but
especially poor and working-class women. Sanger’s conviction that poor women’s ability
to control their fertility would improve the lives of their families and affect society for the

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better was shared by Katō Ishimoto Shidzue (1897–2001), who met Sanger while living in
New York in 1921. Shortly after Sanger’s visit, Ishimoto was joined by medical doctors,
university professors, the founder of the Yūaikai labor union, and socialist–feminist
Yamakawa Kikue in a combined effort to study birth control and establish a small clinic.
In 1932, just as Japan was entering the militarist period, Ishimoto formed the Birth
Control League of Japan. In December 1937, she was arrested and jailed briefly. Her
clinic was closed down in January 1938, and the birth control movement was put on hold
until after World War II.

Feminism and Politics in the War Years

Following the Manchurian Incident in 1931, Japanese feminists struggled with the
question of supporting their nation—a key element in the quest for women’s rights—or
opposing the increasing repression at home and the expanding warfare on the Asian
continent. At first, most of them opposed Japan’s foreign policy and continued to work for
women’s rights at home while recognizing that the struggle for voting rights was
increasingly hopeless. By the end of the 1930s, feminists abandoned even these efforts.
During the period from 1931 to 1945, almost all progressives went to jail, abandoned
their activism and lived quietly under the radar, or tried to find a way to survive by
cooperating with the government.

Immediately after the Manchurian Incident, many feminists, speaking as “mothers of

humanity,” outspokenly condemned the war. Feminists’ opposition was to military
expansionism in China, though not to Japanese colonialism in Korea, which few opposed.
By the late 1930s, feminists and others appeared to shift their views on a variety of topics
in addition to the war. For example, Ichikawa framed the quest for civil rights as a way for
women to “assist the Emperor.” Because prewar feminists tried to work with a
government that is today discredited—particularly following the expanded discussion in
the 1980s about the “comfort women,” Japan’s military sexual slaves—later feminist
historians have critiqued them.

Japanese feminists who had been involved in transnational movements felt torn between
nationalism and transnationalism. In 1934, Japan’s WCTU and YWCA leaders lamented
this in Japanese Women Speak: A Message from the Christian Women of Japan to the
Christian Women of America, an English-language book published in Boston and targeted
to an American audience to maintain international ties. In 1938, the WCTU began
publishing an English-language journal, Japan Through Women, to highlight the positive
deeds of Japan’s women. But this effort failed, and the Japanese WCTU cut its ties to the
World WCTU at the beginning of the Pacific War in December 1941. The Japanese WCTU
and other Christian groups refocused their transnational efforts toward Asia. To reach out
to China, the Japanese WCTU built schools and a medical settlement house in Beijing and
undertook social reform projects, believing these acts of sisterhood would improve
Japan’s image in China. But these projects were possible only because they were under

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Feminism in Japan

the protection of the Japanese military, and rather than improving Japan’s image, they
tied the knot of imperialism more tightly.

Like their Christian counterparts, secular feminists had long-existing links with feminists
across the Pacific that were strained by Japan’s militarist actions. The WSL tried to
maintain ties to Western friends by publishing Japanese Women, an English-language
newsletter whose goal was similar to that of the WCTU’s Japan Through Women. The
journal, edited by Ichikawa Fusae, printed sixteen issues from 1938 to 1940, and ended
publication in July 1940.

By the middle of the 1930s, advocating women’s suffrage was strongly challenged, as
Japan’s militarist government kept suffragists under close surveillance. The WSL turned
to less overtly political activities—such as reforming garbage collection, municipal
utilities, elections, and the Tokyo fish market—as a way of involving disenfranchised
women in governance. In several elections in the early 1930s, the WSL campaigned for
candidates they believed to be incorruptible, calling this action an “election purification”
movement. Another of the feminists’ activities in the 1930s focused on getting the
government to pass welfare legislation for poor mothers and children. In 1934, twenty
women’s organizations lobbied together for the Mother–Child Protection Law. This passed
in 1937, giving financial assistance to single and widowed mothers.

The ideological trends in feminism can be viewed in the changing resolutions passed by
the annual National Women’s Suffrage Conventions held throughout the 1930s. The first
convention, in 1930, optimistically focused on the vote. The third convention, in 1932,
condemned the Manchurian Incident and the rise of “fascism” in Japan. The fifth
convention, in 1934, supported resolutions for peace, for welfare benefits to families of
soldiers killed in the war, for cooperation with women around the world, for birth control,
and for mother–child protection legislation. By the sixth convention, held in 1935, the
suffragists’ views had shifted to calling on the government to give women the vote so they
might help the government in this time of “emergency” (a term used by the government
as a euphemism for war). The conventions were supplanted in 1938 by a Women’s
National Emergency Congress when the rise of militarism at home made suffrage
conferences suspect. That was the end of conventions focused on women’s civil rights
until after World War II.

The largest women’s organizations during the long prewar and war period were those run
by the Ministry of Education, the Army, and the Home Ministry. The membership of these
organizations, taken together, reached 19 million by the end of the 1930s. The
independent women’s organizations, both Christian and secular, resented these
government-affiliated organizations at first: they were run by men, they took potential
members away from groups dedicated to women’s rights, and they dealt with women
from the perspective of mobilizing them to serve the state through stereotyped women’s
roles. Groups like the WSL, YWCA, and WCTU came together in a Federation of Japanese
Women’s Organizations in 1937, and were forced to disband three years later. Many of
their members came to accept the government organizations as venues for women’s

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Feminism in Japan

agency outside the home. In February 1942, the government brought all Japanese
women’s organizations together into one large group, the Dai Nippon Fujinkai (Greater
Japan Women’s Association), including the government-directed groups as well as
feminist, Christian, and social reform groups. (Many of these independent groups had
already been disbanded.)

Ichikawa Fusae was the secular feminist most often criticized after the war for having
replaced her earlier opposition to the state with the kind of wartime collaboration in
government-sponsored activities on the home front also undertaken by most other secular
and Christian feminists. Ichikawa, who later became one of the most highly respected
members of the Diet, was purged by the postwar US military occupation (one of only
eight women, later two, out of a total of over 200,000 Japanese who were purged).

Poverty, Gender, and Sexuality after the War

Millions of Japanese heard the voice of the emperor for the first time on August 15, 1945.
He called on the Japanese people to “endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable.”
At the end of the war, 9 million Japanese were homeless. An additional 7 million were
scattered throughout the empire and needed to find a home in Japan when they did
return.

Both men and women suffered, but in many cases it was women, many of them widows,
who struggled to find new ways for their families to survive in the chaotic times right
after defeat. Agricultural production was a fraction of its prewar level, and families who
lived on the meager rations allotted by the government could not survive. Most depended
on food they bought on the black market. Most businesses had been destroyed, so there
were few jobs for urban people. The firebombing of cities led to the destruction of
housing and a resulting mass migration to the countryside before the war ended, but
almost half the population still lived in the cities, often in huts made of scavenged wood
from destroyed houses.

Compounding Japanese concerns was the Allied military occupation, which lasted from
1945 to 1952. Anticipating the arrival of foreign forces, the Japanese government spent
the last two weeks of August destroying government records and setting up sex stations
for the army of occupation. On August 18, the government secretly began planning for
“comfort stations.” In little more than a week, 1,300 young women, mostly destitute
widows and orphans, had signed up to work in the newly created Recreation and
Amusement Association (RAA). Many were depressed because they had thought they
would find jobs as clerks and typists, but others accepted jobs as sex workers, believing
that would be the only way to keep their families and themselves from starvation.

The RAA was short lived but historically important. US officials severed their ties with the
RAA after a few months because of a very high rate of sexually transmitted disease and
because the Americans had come to view the official brothels as a violation of women’s
human rights. The sex trades did not end with the closing of the RAA brothels, however.
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Feminism in Japan

Thousands of women worked in licensed brothels or became pan-pan (the occupation-era

term for sex workers not affiliated with brothels). Japanese Christian feminist
organizations, such as the YWCA and WCTU, reestablished themselves after the war and
worked to end all licensed and nonlicensed prostitution and to oppose the US
occupation’s treatment of all Japanese women as prostitutes. Feminists were rightly
appalled that average women were routinely pulled from the street or public
transportation by American military police and publicly humiliated by being forced to
undergo gynecological exams in front of military examiners. Some were jailed, and others
were sprayed with toxic disinfectants. Christian and secular women’s organizations
vigorously protested this treatment.

Politics and Gender During the Occupation

Ichikawa Fusae and the WSL searched throughout war-torn Tokyo for survivors of the
prewar group. On August 25, several members met to establish the Women’s Committee
on Postwar Policy. On September 11, they held a large meeting—70 participants—at
which they resolved to promote women’s actions to survive the difficult times. At a
meeting on September 24, they resolved to demand full civil rights, especially the vote.
The Japanese cabinet, at its first meeting on October 9, decided that women should be
granted rights; the following day, Ichikawa visited Prime Minister Shidehara Kijurō and
other cabinet ministers, who verbally confirmed that the government would amend the
election law to grant women political rights.

Before the government could make that announcement, Gen. Douglas MacArthur,
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, met with the Prime Minister the next day
(October 11) and presented him a list of reforms the United States demanded. Women’s
full civil rights were at the top of the list. Ichikawa and other feminists, as well as male
supporters in government who wished to credit the suffragists for their hard work over
several decades, were deeply disappointed that the Americans would be credited with
granting women rights. Women went to the polls in the first postwar election on April 10,
1946. Two-thirds of eligible women voters cast their ballots, an extraordinary percentage
when compared to other countries right after women were enfranchised. (It is estimated
that 35–45 percent of eligible women voted in the United States in the decade after
gaining the vote in 1920.)

Thirty-nine women were elected members of the Diet in 1946. The first women
representatives were highly educated, and many were professionals. Feminists of varying
political persuasions formed organizations to educate new voters about their rights and
to formulate demands for social and political reform. They transcended party lines as the
Fujin Giin Kurabu (Women Diet Representatives Club) to work on issues related to
women’s roles as mothers, including policies for food distribution, stabilizing milk prices
and securing adequate milk supplies, and repatriation of soldiers.

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Feminism in Japan

In November 1946, Ichikawa Fusae and other prewar feminists created the New Japan
Women’s League (renamed the League of Women Voters in 1950) as a successor to the
WSL. Women on the left, including novelist Miyamoto Yuriko, birth control advocate Katō
(Ishimoto) Shidzue, and notable educators and labor activists from the prewar period,
formed the Women’s Democratic Club in March 1946. Joining the Japanese women in
undertaking the political education of women was the occupation’s Lt. Ethel Weed,
Women’s Affairs Information Officer of the Civil Information and Education Section, who
lectured throughout the country and published articles in newspapers and magazines.
The role of the American occupation in promoting women’s political education meant that
the socialist–feminist movement in Japan was stifled in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Women’s Democratic Club and forty-one other women’s organizations had formed the
Nihon Minshu Fujin Kyōgikai (Japan Democratic Women’s Council) in 1948. The council
reached out to the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a large global
organization that was supported by communist countries and leftist movements in
noncommunist countries during the Cold War. This alarmed Ethel Weed, and the
occupation forbade the council from attending the WIDF meeting in Beijing in 1949. The
purge of WDC leaders (and the death of Miyamoto) at the end of the occupation led to the
WDC’s disbanding in 1953.

Although some of the first women Diet members remained in office for just one year, six
of their number played a notable role in Japanese political history. These six were among
the seventy-two Diet members who reviewed the draft of the new Constitution. The 1947
Constitution, which guarantees women’s political equality, was not actually written by the
Japanese Diet, but rather by the American occupation. The clauses dealing with women’s
rights were written by twenty-two-year-old Beate Sirota, who had grown up in Japan and
was, therefore, one of the few members of the Constitution committee fluent in Japanese.
The Constitution stipulates that women and men are equal under the law (Article 14) and
that husbands and wives have equal rights in marriage (Article 24).

Two prewar feminist leaders, planning to stand for election in 1947, were purged by the
occupation right before that election and were therefore forbidden from playing any
public roles. One was Takeuchi Shigeyo (1881–1975), a pioneering medical doctor in the
early 20th century and later a suffragist who served on a government commission during
World War II. Takeuchi was one of the first thirty-nine women elected to the Diet in 1946,
but was prohibited from running in 1947. The other was Ichikawa Fusae. Her numerous
influential friends in the United States petitioned to have her released from the purge,
and the depurging committee agreed. But for reasons that are not clear, Ichikawa was not
depurged until the end of the occupation. (Some additional women had served the
government during the war but escaped the purge.) Ichikawa did not enter electoral
politics immediately upon the Americans’ departure. Rather, she resurrected a movement
for anticorruption in politics that had been part of the WSL’s activities in the 1930s when
the Japanese government made advocating women’s voting rights impossible. In 1953,
Japan’s League of Women Voters urged her to run for the House of Councillors. She won

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Feminism in Japan

and joined other prewar feminists such as Oku Mumeo, Katō Shidzue, and Kamichika
Ichiko as a Diet member.

Gender and the Family in the First Postwar

Years
The lives of men and women were radically changed in many ways in the postwar years.
The new Constitution required major changes in the Civil Code and the Labor Standards
Law. The 19th century Civil Code stipulated that the senior male was the head of the
family and that other members of the family had fewer rights, especially in inheritance
(which under most circumstances was to go to the eldest son), choice of domicile, and
divorce (wives had fewer grounds for divorce). The new Civil Code of 1947 equalized the
grounds for divorce, but in other ways, the Civil Code continued to carry the baggage of
the past. It has been a continuing struggle for postwar feminists to amend the code.

Another gendered change was the creation of the Women’s and Minors’ Bureau (Fujin
Shōnen Kyoku) in the Ministry of Labor to oversee the protection of women and children
in the workplace, enforce laws against child labor, and conduct surveys of working
conditions. Prewar socialist feminist Yamakawa Kikue was appointed the first director of
this bureau.

The family was also changed by the legalization of birth control and abortion. Concerned
about the country’s inability to feed the growing numbers of children born during the
postwar baby boom, medical doctors and bureaucrats joined with prewar feminist
advocates of birth control, such as Katō Shidzue, to propose ways to limit Japan’s
population growth. Katō unsuccessfully submitted a bill to the Diet to legalize birth
control in 1947. A later bill became the Eugenic Protection Law (Yūsei Hogo Hō),
implemented in 1948. Rather than focusing on contraception, which Katō advocated and
which remained illegal until 1949, the Eugenic Protection Law focused on abortion,
making abortion legal if the mother’s medical or economic condition would be imperiled
by carrying a pregnancy to term.

When the “Second Wave” of the feminist movement took off in the 1970s, many observers
at that time incorrectly believed it was a new challenge to a “traditional” family made up
of a stay-at-home housewife, a white-collar husband more dedicated to his company than
to his family, and one or two children driven to academic success by an “education
mama.” But this “tradition” only dated from the 1950s. Japanese women, men, and
children had always worked—in shops, in factories, and on farms. When 1970s feminists
attacked a society divided into a female-dominated home and a male-dominated
workplace, they were challenging institutions of relatively recent history.

The vocal feminist movement of the 1970s did not emerge from thin air after a period of
complete quiescence. One of the key feminist efforts in the 1950s was the movement to
eliminate licensed prostitution. Women legislators, many of them members of prewar

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Feminism in Japan

feminist organizations, pushed the Prostitution Prevention Law (a law not supported by
many sex workers themselves) through the Diet in 1956. Other organizations that
emerged after the war adopted a variety of approaches to improve women’s status. Some
of these reinforced old gender norms. For example, Oku Mumeo, who had worked with
Ichikawa Fusae and Hiratsuka Raichō in the NWA from 1919 to 1922, founded the
Shufuren (Housewives Association) in 1948. This association was fairly militant in its
assertion of women’s power as consumers within the household. Marching for better
products and economic justice, its members carried giant mock-ups of a rice-serving
scoop that symbolized women’s role as housewives. The Housewives Association
continues to play a large role in movements against pollution and global climate change.

Another women’s organization, the Mothers’ Convention (Hahaoya Taikai), which

mobilized women politically as mothers, was founded in 1955. A nonpartisan peace
organization focused on the prevention of nuclear war, the Mothers’ Convention had
transnational links, similar to the prewar women’s peace movements. The group grew
rapidly: 13,000 women delegates attended the 1960 annual meeting. Members used what
was defined at the time as the traditional family to advance their causes.

This traditional family was seen by many as a means of empowerment for women, but
attacked by others in the “Housewife Debate” of the mid-1950s for holding women back.
This debate, like the “Motherhood Protection Debate” of the late 1910s, was waged in the
pages of women’s and other mass-circulation journals. At least one debater of the 1910s,
Hiratsuka Raichō, contributed to the 1950s debate. The opening salvo of the debate was
launched by Ishigaki Ayako (1903–1996) in February 1955 with an article in a special
issue on working women of the women’s journal Fujin kōron. Ishigaki was a feminist
journalist who had migrated to America in the 1920s, where she married noted Japanese
American artist Ishigaki Eitarō. Her 1955 article unleashed a torrent of reactions that
reflected the diversity of 1950s attitudes toward housewives.

Feminism in the 1970s

As Japan became one of the world’s most prosperous countries in the late 1960s, many
women grew tired of their second-class social status and added their voices to the global
feminist movements that are often called “second wave feminism.” Large numbers of
middle-class married women joined movements to make a better, cleaner, and safer
Japan, stating they were doing so as mothers protecting their children. Housewives’
groups sprang up in every neighborhood. During the same years, the Anpō o Tatakau
Fujin Renrakukai (Women’s Conference Fighting the US–Japan Security Treaty)
assembled women, some of them from the grassroots housewives’ movements, who
opposed Japan’s role in the United States-led Vietnam War. These 1960s and 1970s
movements reenergized the antipollution, antiwar, and women’s movements, and by the
end of the 1970s, some of their members contemplated running for office as housewife-
citizens.

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Additional women’s movements with more expressly feminist ideologies sprang up in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. These movements, called “women’s liberation” groups by the
press and by their members, differed from the organizations that stressed women’s
political strengths as housewives and mothers. The new feminist organizations’ members
were often younger. Many had participated in New Left movements of the 1960s that had
focused on opposition to global capitalism and America’s war in Vietnam. The leadership
of many of the New Left groups was male and often sexist. “Consciousness-raising”
activities led thousands of formerly New Left women to redefine feminism in new terms.
These included a questioning of sexuality, motherhood, and women’s oppression as
women. Motherhood, which earlier housewife feminists had viewed as a source of
strength, came to be seen as leading to inequality.

These kinds of revolutionary approaches paralleled those in feminist movements in other

countries, and transnational linkages among radical feminist organizations were
reestablished. Japanese feminists in the early 1970s viewed their position in more
complex ways than many feminists in the West, however. For example, the Ajia Fujin Kaigi
(Asian Women’s Conference), founded in the summer of 1970, articulated the view that
while Japanese women were oppressed by sexism in Japanese society and by Western
imperialism toward people of color, Japanese women were also complicit (even if
unconsciously) in the First World’s economic oppression of other Asian women. Thus,
they were simultaneously oppressed and oppressors. Another group founded in 1970,
Tatakau Onna (Fighting Women), got its start fighting against proposed limitations of
women’s reproductive rights, but soon turned its attention to broader questions of the
sexual liberation of women. The Shinjuku Women’s Liberation Center was established in
1972 as an organizing hub and as a women’s shelter. Another group, Chūpiren, used
sensationalist tactics—like wearing pink helmets—to promote the goals of legalizing oral
contraceptives and eliminating the sexual double standard.

Hundreds of small mimeographed magazines and newsletters spread the ideas and public
actions of the women’s liberation movement. Other, more substantial publications, such
as the magazines Onna: Erosu (Woman: Eros) and Feminisuto (Feminist), founded by
scholars and artists, were also widely read. Feminisuto consciously referenced the past by
adding a subtitle: “The New Bluestocking.” Mainstream newspapers publicized feminists’
actions, but their coverage was often negative. One sympathetic mainstream journalist
was the feminist Matsui Yayori (1934–2002), who wrote for the Asahi, one of the most
respected newspapers in Japan. In addition to her excellent reporting about women,
especially women in Asia, she was also the founder of the Ajia no Onnatachi no Kai (Asian
Women’s Association).

Negative press coverage changed in 1975, with the United Nations (UN) International
Women’s Year. In late 1974, veteran feminists Ichikawa Fusae and Tanaka Sumiko (1909–
1995) coordinated a large number of women’s groups, ranging from old-line women’s
organizations to radical feminists, writers, intellectuals, members of the bureaucracy, and
academics, to plan for Japan’s participation in the 1975 UN meeting in Mexico City. In
January 1975, they founded the International Women’s Year Action Group and created a

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Feminism in Japan

progressive agenda for change. The Action Group continued long after the Mexico City
conference, coordinating the activities of several dozen organizations. They addressed a
wide range of issues, from organizing for the 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law
and other laws to improve the status of women, to protesting sexist television
commercials. The Action Group joined with other Japanese women’s groups, including the
Asian Women’s Conference, the Asian Women’s Association (whose initial goal was to
combat sex tourism), and venerable Christian organizations such as the Japanese WCTU
—as well as feminist groups in South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines—to attack sex
tourism by Japanese men in those countries.

Feminism and the Workplace

Persistent economic inequality, particularly in the workplace, was a leading feminist issue
in the 1970s and 1980s. Discussion about an Equal Employment Opportunity Law began
after Japan’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). These discussions highlighted significant
ideological differences among employers, workers, the government, and feminist groups.
The only legislation until that time that addressed workplace gender inequality had been
Article 14 of the Japanese Constitution of 1947, which prohibited discrimination on the
basis of sex; the Labor Standards Law of 1947, which mandated equal pay for equal work
and maternity leave for women workers; and the Working Women’s Welfare Law of 1972,
which called for counseling and training of women workers. Although some women had
attempted to improve workplace conditions through litigation, there were no penalties for
employers who failed to hire, pay, or treat women and men equally.

During the prosperous decades of the 1970s and 1980s, many women in their late 20s
whose husbands made good salaries left full-time jobs to become full-time mothers and
housewives. Returning to the workforce, as many did in their late 30s, they were unable
to get good full-time jobs because companies did not hire older workers into promotion-
track positions. In addition, the Labor Standards Law had codified the pre–World War II
feminist demand to protect women from having to work on midnight shifts. Employers
were reluctant to hire women, whom they could not force to work the long hours they
pressured men to work. In 1978, the Labor Standards Law Research Association reported
that some of the “motherhood protection” provisions under the law such as limited work
hours did, in fact, harm women’s chances for employment and promotion. Employers’
associations opposed any movement toward equality of opportunity for women, claiming
that women had no work consciousness. Women’s work opportunities and pay lagged far
behind men’s.

Feminists supported different approaches to changes in labor law. Some wished to abolish
the motherhood protection clauses that differentiated male and female employees, while
others wanted to retain some of those provisions. Some feminists had to be persuaded
that menstruation leave had no relationship to women’s health and was no longer
necessary. In the end, the bill proposed by the Diet in 1984 was opposed by forty-eight

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women’s organizations of the Action Group because it presumed that all men and women
must adopt the male employment model rather than one that balanced work and home for
both men and women.

The law passed in 1985, but it was flawed. Women and men on a track toward a
managerial position had to accept long hours of daily work as well as the possibility of
being transferred to a branch office far from one’s spouse and children. The law also only
called on employers to “endeavor” to hire without regard to gender. Despite its flaws, the
law temporarily improved labor conditions for women, until a major recession hit Japan in
the 1990s.

Fortunately, additional legislation marginally improved women’s work conditions. The

Child-Care Leave Law of 1992 allowed either parent to take a partially paid leave of up to
a year after the birth of a child. But few parents, especially fathers, initially took this
leave. In 1997, the Long-Term Care Insurance Law shifted responsibility for caring for the
elderly from the family to society, thereby lifting some—though not all—of the burden for
that care from daughters and daughters-in-law, who had traditionally been responsible for
it. Some of the weaknesses of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law’s protections for
equality in the workplace were addressed in 1997. Sanctions against discrimination in
hiring were included in a revision of the law in 1997. A more comprehensive Gender
Equality Law of 2007 stipulated penalties for discrimination in both hiring and workplace
conditions, but women’s pay equity and access to management positions continues to lag
behind those in most industrialized countries.

Academic and Political Feminisms

The resurgence of the feminist movement in the early 1970s and the excitement of
International Women’s Year in 1975 encouraged feminist scholarship and inspired
women’s studies courses and programs at many universities. Two major scholarly groups,
each with an important journal disseminating feminist research, were established: the
Women’s Studies Society of Japan, founded in Kyoto in 1978, and the Women’s Studies
Association of Japan, founded in Tokyo in 1979. Feminist scholars were featured on talk
shows and were appointed to government councils, although most were still teaching at
smaller colleges before they began to break into the top tier of elite universities in the
1990s. The appointment that made the biggest splash in the news was that of Japan’s
most prominent feminist, sociologist Ueno Chizuko, in 1993 at the University of Tokyo,
Japan’s most prestigious university. In addition to the still small but growing number of
women in academia, feminists influenced government policy-making in the 1990s. Ōsawa
Mari (b. 1953) played a particularly important role in the drafting of feminist legislation.

That legislation became the center of Japan’s “state feminism”—that is, feminism
promoted by the state. Some of the laws drafted in the 1990s by the government, with the
advice of feminist scholars and of women Diet representatives, addressed societal
shortcomings that slowed women’s progress in the labor force, such as insufficient child-
care and elder-care provisions, despite legal requirements for these. Other laws
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Feminism in Japan

addressed problems of gendered bodily harm. These included the 1999 Law for Punishing
Acts Related to Child Prostitution and Child Pornography and for Protecting Children, the
2000 Anti-Stalking Law, and the 2001 Law for the Prevention of Spousal Violence and the
Protection of Victims, which criminalized behavior previously overlooked as personal.

These laws all helped women and children, and they did not produce the resistance
encountered by the 1999 Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society. The Basic Law called for
a Gender Equality Bureau in the Prime Minister’s cabinet and divisions responsible for
carrying out gender initiatives in each ministry and agency. Prefectures, cities, and towns
were also required to create plans to carry out the law. Around the same time, though
coincidentally, feminists and others began discussing a concept called jendā furī (gender
free). That term was used in several ways: to mean free of gender bias or free of gender
itself. The first meaning called for the removal of inequality in society, economy, and
government between two binary genders, male and female; the second suggested
redefining gender as a constructed concept that could be changed or eliminated. Right-
wing nationalists within Japan started to become concerned about the effects of what
they saw as transnational feminism on Japan, and attacked the 1999 Basic Law as a
manifestation of foreign-style “gender free” ideology—especially the second definition.
When the backlash started, feminists in government and academia had already been
working, under the Basic Law, to implement policies based on both meanings of “gender
free.”

Exacerbating conservatives’ concerns about Japan’s adopting “foreign” values and their
discomfort about the possibility of “gender free” leading to greater acceptance of
lesbians, gay men, and transgender people was the government’s panic, expressed since
the 1980s, about Japan’s declining fertility rate. That stood at about 1.3 children per
woman in 2005, and Japan’s population was beginning to decline. At 1.4 children per
woman in 2015, Japan had a lower fertility rate than all but thirteen countries in the
world. At the same time, Japan ranked highest among large countries in longevity. The
panic had two parts: concern about the insufficiency of working-age people to support the
growing number of elderly retirees, and the decline of Japan’s global status as it fell from
being one of the larger countries in the world to a middle-sized country in terms of
population. Women should focus on making babies, conservatives opined in their attack
on the Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society.

The concept of “gender free” was the first issue to be hit by the backlash, and familiar
fears like unisex restrooms in schools were next to emerge. Some feminists retreated
strategically from the more inclusive meanings of gender free to defend the policies that
called for equal treatment of men and women. Even in that climate, some progress was
made in redefining gender. Sexual reassignment surgery was legalized in 2003, and the
Japan Association for Queer Studies was founded in 2007 (it has since disbanded).
Feminist scholar and activist Ueno Chizuko retired from the University of Tokyo in 2011
to run an Internet site, the Women’s Action Network (WAN), which she built into a
powerful feminist communications network that includes archival materials, global
feminist news, and information about actions in Japan and elsewhere. Some of the

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Feminism in Japan

socially transformative aspects of the Basic Law may have been postponed, but
contemporary feminists continue to work toward building a more equal Japan.

Discussion of the Literature

Long before gender became a category of analysis, women’s rights activists in Japan
recognized that publishing a history of feminist activities (both in Japan and elsewhere in
the world) would reify their movement and establish a record that was less likely to be
overlooked by posterity.1 Those feminists wrote for political reasons, not as professional
historians, but the legacy of their works has been more far reaching than they may have
intended. These works in Japanese, written in the 1920s, were followed by histories and
ethnological and sociological studies of Japanese women written in both Japanese and
English in the 1930s. Some of those in English were written by Christian feminists and
other feminists for political reasons as well—that is, to maintain transnational ties as
Japan’s wartime activities attenuated those ties. One such work was Japanese Women
Speak: A Message from the Christian Women of Japan to the Christian Women of
America, published in Boston in 1934.2 The first English-language work that was a self-
conscious history of Japanese women qua history (that is, without a conscious advocacy
motive) was The Force of Women in Japanese History, published in 1953, by Mary Beard,
a leading American intellectual to whom the work’s Japanese author (Katō Ishimoto
Shidzue) gave permission to publish under her name.3

In the historical field, a few books and articles about women took a similar approach to
these early works—that is, they attempted to find notable women and add them, in a
compensatory manner, to the male-centered dominant narrative of history. Sharon
Sievers’s pathbreaking work Flowers in Salt changed this in 1983, modifying the
dominant narrative by focusing on Meiji-era feminism.4

The history field began to be rapidly altered in the 1990s and early 2000s with works on
gender and sexuality in English and other European languages by Vera Mackie, Janet
Hunter, Greg Pflugfelder, Barbara Sato, Kathleen Uno, Sheldon Garon, Ron Loftus,
Patricia Tsurumi, Don Roden, Ayako Kano, Regine Matthias, Sabine Frühstück, Sally
Hastings (who was also the editor for about twenty years of the US-Japan Women’s
Journal, which has introduced English readers to a plethora of translations of Japanese
scholars’ works since 1988), and others.5 These scholars included gender issues in new
histories of politics, labor, migration and diaspora, activism, culture and the literary and
theatrical arts, economics, sexualities, masculinities (which trailed the study of
femininities but is now booming), nationalism, and other subfields. Most of these scholars
are trained historians or scholars in diverse fields whose work displays a keen historical
sense. Most, though not all, address feminism and feminist movements.

Gail Lee Bernstein’s 1991 edited collection Recreating Japanese Women made the study
of women accessible to larger audiences in the 1990s.6 The field of gender history took
off in Japan as well, with leading historians publishing in both Japanese and English—one
noteworthy English-language publication at the end of the 1990s was the monumental
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Feminism in Japan

two-volume collection of essays by Japanese scholars, Gender and Japanese History,

edited by Wakita Haruko, Ueno Chizuko, and Anne Bouchy.7 In the 1990s and 2000s, the
prestigious historical journal Rekishi Hyōron ran special issues on women’s history, many
of them articles on feminism, every year.

Women’s studies academic organizations that began to flourish in Japan in the late 1970s
and 1980s produced works that radically expanded the field of women’s history. The
International Group for the Study of Women hosted an international conference in 1978
and published a pioneering work in English and Japanese the following year.8 The
Women’s Suffrage Center, founded in 1946 by suffragist Ichikawa Fusae and her
colleagues as a gathering place to help newly enfranchised women, expanded radically
through the following decades. In the mid-1970s, their collection of not-yet-catalogued
materials from 20th-century women’s movements was one of the few places one could do
primary research in feminist history. Over the years, they expanded their capacity and
organized and digitized many of the materials. The archive is now part of the Fusae
Ichikawa Center for Women and Governance.

In the 1980s, Japanese feminist historians’ anger about women’s support for the wartime
government—especially in light of the exposure of the gendered oppression of “comfort
women”—fueled a historiographical debate about feminism during World War II.
Historians like Suzuki Yūko and Kanō Mikiyo strongly criticized both leaders and average
women—calling the latter the “home front”—for not being more actively opposed to the
war.9 A leading feminist scholar, sociologist Ueno Chizuko, analyzed this historiographical
turn in her critique of nationalism and feminism, originally published in Japanese and
translated as Nationalism and Gender in 2004.10 The bitterness of this issue seems to
have subsided in recent decades. That is not to say that the issue of war responsibility has
disappeared; rather, the wartime Japanese feminists’ support of the war has become
normalized in works by feminist historians.

After the turn of the century, scholarship on femininities, masculinities, gender, and
sexualities continued to expand greatly, building on the foundation established in the
1990s. Nuanced works in English on gender, women, feminisms, and/or sexuality in the
Meiji era (late 19th and early 20th centuries) have come out in the last two decades by
Vera Mackie, Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, Marnie Anderson, Mara Patessio, Bill Mihalopulos,
Harald Fuess, Sabine Frühstück, Barbara Brooks, Kathleen Uno, Hiroko Tomida, and
numerous others.11 Historical scholarship on the interwar and wartime era is perhaps
even more lively, with some of the scholars noted above joined by Dina Lowy, Miriam
Silverberg, Michiko Suzuki, Haruko Cook, Sarah Frederick, Jan Bardsley, Teruko Craig,
Shibahara Taeko, Noriyo Hayakawa, Helen Hopper, Manako Ogawa, Mariko Tamanoi,
Rumi Yasutake, Sumiko Otsubo, Janet Hunter, Andrea Germer, Barbara Molony, and
Elyssa Faison.12 Many of these scholars have employed transnational and intersectional
approaches. Gendering the history of the postwar and contemporary eras, as in the work
done by Cristopher Gerteis, Mire Koikari, Sarah Kovner, Sally Hastings, Naoko
Shibusawa, John Dower, Andrew Gordon, Ayako Kano, Jan Bardsley, Setsu Shigematsu,
Julia Bullock, Sandra Buckley, and others, has fundamentally rewritten those eras, too.13

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Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall’s excellent edited collection Recreating Japanese
Men has underscored that gender is not limited to women.14 Mark McLelland and Vera
Mackie’s monumental Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia allows
readers to sample widely from that growing field as well.15

The foremothers and forefathers who continue to expand the field, bringing in more
intersectional, interdisciplinary, and transnational approaches, have been joined, in
Western languages, by scholars whose works have destabilized our views of the building
of the modern state, the meaning of location (through gendered diaspora), the
construction of the modern “citizen,” the building of the economy, intersectional
meanings of race, ethnicity, and empire, and many other topics scholars used to think
were stable.16 For example, studies that focus on Japan in the world have forced “the
world” to see Japanese gender history as consequential and not peripheral to a Western-
dominated master narrative. This has become particularly important in historical studies
of countries where Japanese people migrated.17

Finally, the explosion of history and historiography about feminism in Japan has
paralleled a more than century-long dialogue between feminists around the Pacific Rim.
From the late 19th century until today, transnational feminist organizations globally
linked secular women (International Woman Suffrage Alliance, WILPF, the ILO, and Pan
Pacific Women’s Association) and Christian women (YWCA, WCTU, and others). The
documents of these organizations are excellent primary sources on feminism.

Primary Sources
Primary sources on Japanese feminism are available mainly in Japanese. The best archive
on the women’s movements of the 20th century is maintained by the Fusae Ichikawa
Center for Women and Governance.18 In the 1970s, as a major wave of research on
women’s history took off in Japan, numerous organizations, such as the Japan Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union and women’s colleges and universities, published their
documents in major collections.19 Scholars also gathered complete sets of documents
from particular movements, such as the Motherhood Protection Debate.20 Very extensive
sets of documents on all aspects of women’s, gender, and feminist history include the
twelve-volume set Nihon fujin mondai shiryō shūsei.21 Individual volumes cover different
subjects, including human rights, women’s political movements, labor, education, the
family system, and health and welfare. Women’s political rights documents are collected
in volume 2. A collection of speeches and written documents of the women’s movement
may be found in Kindai Nihon joseishi e no shōgen.22 Domesu published numerous
collections of primary sources in the 1980s. In addition, an excellent collection of
materials of the various women’s rights movements beginning in the 19th century, Nihon
josei undō shiryō shūsei, has been assembled by Suzuki Yūko. For documents from the
1970s women’s liberation movement, see Shiryō Nihon ūman ribu-shi, edited by
Mizoguchi Akiyo, Saeki Yōko, and Miki Sōko.23

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Feminism in Japan

Primary sources in English, especially for the period of the US occupation of Japan
following World War II, may be found in the United States National Archives, Record
Group 331. The American occupation required that all documents and publications be
translated into English to be accessible to the American censors, and thus these archives
are unrivaled for the years 1945 to 1952. They are both extensive and, fortunately for
researchers without Japanese fluency, in English.

A variety of primary courses in English have been assembled by Barbara Molony,

Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, and Taeko Shibahara and are available online in the Japan cluster
of Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820.24

Many interwar feminists wrote memoirs, but almost all are in Japanese. One that is
readily available in the original English is (Katō) Ishimoto Shidzue’s Facing Two Ways.
Another, which has been translated into English, is Hiratsuka Raichō’s In the Beginning,
Woman Was the Sun.25 Primary documents of the Bluestocking movement have been
translated and annotated by Jan Bardsley.26

The best archive of primary sources for the contemporary feminist movement is the
Women’s Action Network (WAN), founded by Ueno Chizuko.27

Further Reading
Anderson, Marnie S. A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan. Cambridge. MA:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2010.

Bardsley, Jan. Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Bernstein, Gail Lee, ed. Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991.

Bullock, Julia, Ayako Kano, and James Welker, eds. Rethinking Japanese Feminisms.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017.

Faison, Elyssa. Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2007.

Frederick, Sarah. Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar
Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.

Germer, Andrea, Vera Mackie, and Ulrike Wöhr, eds. Gender, Nation and State in Modern
Japan. London: Routledge, 2014.

Gerteis, Christopher. Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated

Unions in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Hastings, Sally A. “Women Legislators in the Postwar Diet.” In Re-imaging Japanese

Women. Edited by Anne E. Imamura. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

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Feminism in Japan

Hiratsuka Raichō. In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a
Japanese Feminist. Translated by Teruko Craig. New York: Columbia University Press,
2006.

Hunter, Janet, ed. Japanese Women Working. London: Routledge, 1993.

Kano, Ayako. Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and
Labor. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016.

Kovner, Sarah. Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Lowy, Dina. The Japanese “New Woman”: Images of Gender and Modernity. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Lublin, Elizabeth Dorn. Reforming Japan: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in
the Meiji Period. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2010.

Mackie, Vera. Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality.

Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Mihalopoulos, Bill. Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870–1930: Prostitutes, Emigration and

Nation-Building. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.

Molony, Barbara. “Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Feminisms in Twentieth-Century

Japan.” In Women’s Movements in Asia: Feminisms and Transnational Activism. Edited by
Mina Roces and Louise Edwards. London: Routledge, 2010.

Molony, Barbara, and Kathleen Uno, eds. Gendering Modern Japanese History.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005.

Shibahara Taeko. Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before
World War II. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014.

Shigematsu, Setsu. Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in
Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Sievers, Sharon L. Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern

Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983.

Suzuki, Michiko. Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese
Literature and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Tsurumi, E. Patricia. Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

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Feminism in Japan

Notes:

(1.) Oku Mumeo, Fujin mondai jūrokkō (Shinchosha, 1925); reprinted with afterword by
Nakamura Kii, in series Kindai fujin mondai meichō senshū, dai rokkan (Tokyo: Nihon
Tosho Sentā, 1982); Oku Mumeo, “Meiji yori Taishō ni itaru fujin no seiji undōshi,” Josei
dōmei 8 (May 1921): 22–25.

(2.) Michi Kawai and Ochimi Kubushiro, Japanese Women Speak: A Message from the
Christian Women of Japan to the Christian Women of America (Boston: Central Committee
on the United Study of Foreign Missions, 1934).

(3.) Mary R. Beard, The Force of Women in Japanese History (Washington, DC: Public
Affairs Press, 1953).

(4.) Sharon Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern
Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983).

(5.) Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment, and Sexuality
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Japanese Women Working, ed.
Janet Hunter (London: Routledge, 1993); Gregory M. Pflugfelder, “‘S’ is for Sister:
Schoolgirl Intimacy and ‘Same-Sex Love’ in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” in Gendering
Modern Japanese History, ed. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2005); Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman:
Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003); Sally A. Hastings, “Women Legislators in the Postwar Diet,” in Re-imaging
Japanese Women, ed. Anne E. Imamura (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996);
Kathleen Uno, “One Day at a Time: Work and Domestic Activities of Urban Lower-Class
Women in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” in Japanese Women Working, ed. Janet Hunter
(London: Routledge, 1993); Sheldon Garon, “Women’s Groups and the Japanese State,”
Journal of Japanese Studies 9.1 (1993); Ronald P. Loftus, Telling Lives: Women’s Self-
Writing in Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004); E. Patricia
Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990); Donald Roden, “Thoughts on the Early Meiji
Gentleman,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, ed. Barbara Molony and Kathleen
Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005); Ayako Kano, Acting Like a
Woman in Modern Japan: Theatre, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001);
Sabine Frühstück, Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the
Japanese Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Regine Matthias,
“Female Labour in the Japanese Coal-Mining Industry,” in Japanese Women Working, ed.
Janet Hunter (London: Routledge, 1993).

(6.) Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).

(7.) Haruko Wakita, Anne Bouchy, and Chizuko Ueno, eds., Gender and Japanese History,
vols. 1 and 2 (Osaka, Japan: Osaka University Press, 1999).

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Feminism in Japan

(8.) Merry I. White and Barbara Molony, eds., Proceedings of the Tokyo Symposium on
Women (International Group for the Study of Women, 1978).

(9.) Among numerous works, see, e.g., Suzuki Yūko, Feminizumo to sensō (Feminism and
War) (Tokyo: Marujusha, 1986); and Kanō Mikiyo, Onnatachi no jūgo (Women and the
Home Front) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1987).

(10.) Chizuko Ueno, Nationalism and Gender, trans. Beverley Yamamoto (Melbourne,
Australia: TransPacific Press, 2004).

(11.) Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, Reforming Japan: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
in the Meiji Period (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010); Marnie S. Anderson, A
Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia
Center, 2010); Mara Patessio, Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan, 2011); Bill Mihalopoulos, Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870–1930
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011); Harald Fuess, Divorce in Japan (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2004); Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social
Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Barbara Brooks,
“Reading the Japanese Colonial Archive: Gender and Bourgeois Civility in Korea and
Manchuria before 1932,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, ed. Barbara Molony and
Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005); and Hiroko
Tomida, Hiratsuka Raichō and Early Japanese Feminism (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill,
2004).

(12.) Dina Lowy, The Japanese “New Woman”: Images of Gender and Modernity (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Miriam Silverberg, “The Modern Girl as
Militant,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991); Michiko Suzuki, Becoming Modern Women: Love
and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2010); Haruko Taya Cook, “Women’s Deaths as Weapons of War in
Japan’s ‘Final Battle,’” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, ed. Barbara Molony and
Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005); Sarah Frederick,
Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006); Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman
Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies,
University of Michigan, 2007); Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun:
The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist, trans. Teruko Craig (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006); Taeko Shibahara, Japanese Women and the Transnational
Feminist Movement before World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014);
Noriyo Hayakawa, “Feminism and Nationalism in Japan, 1868–1945,” Journal of Women’s
History 7.4 (1995); Helen Hopper, A New Woman of Japan: A Political Biography of Katō
Shidzue (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Manako Ogawa, “Estranged Sisterhood:
The Wartime Trans-Pacific Dialogue of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,
1931–1945,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 18 (2007); Mariko Tamanoi,
“Suffragist Women, Corrupt Officials, and Waste Control in Prewar Japan: Two Plays by

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Feminism in Japan

Kaneko Shigeri.” Journal of Asian Studies 68.3 (2009); Rumi Yasutake, “The First Wave of
International Women’s Movements from a Japanese Perspective: Western Outreach and
Japanese Women Activists during the Interwar Years,” Women’s Studies International
Forum 32 (2009); Sumiko Otsubo, “Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage
Restriction Legislation in the 1920s,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, ed, Barbara
Molony and Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005); Janet
Hunter, Women and the Labour Market in Japan’s Industrialising Economy (London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); Andrea Germer, “Feminist History in Japan: National and
International Perspectives,” in Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian
Context 9 (2003); Barbara Molony, “Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Feminisms in
Twentieth-Century Japan,” in Women’s Movements in Asia, ed. Mina Roces and Louise
Edwards (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2010); and Elyssa Faison , Managing Women:
Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

(13.) Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated

Unions in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Mire Koikari,
Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the United States Occupation of
Japan, 1945–1952 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Sarah Kovner,
Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2012); Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimaging the
Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); John Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999);
Ayako Kano, Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016); Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in
Cold War Japan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the
Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012); Julia Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker, eds., Rethinking
Japanese Feminisms (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017); and Sandra Buckley,
Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997).

(14.) Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall, eds., Recreating Japanese Men (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011).

(15.) Mark McLelland and Vera Mackie, eds., Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in
East Asia (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2014).

(16.) Andrea Germer, Vera Mackie, and Ulrike Wöhr, eds., Gender, Nation and State in
Modern Japan (London: Routledge, 2014); and Susan L. Burns and Barbara J. Brooks,
eds., Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
2014).

(17.) Kazuhiro Oharazeki, Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West, 1887–1920
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016).

(18.) Fusae Ichikawa Center for Women and Governance.

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Feminism in Japan

(19.) Nihon Kirisutokyō Fujin Kyōfūkai, ed., Nihon Kirisutukyō Fujin Kyōfūkai hyakunenshi
(Centennial History of the Japanese WCTU) (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1986).

(20.) Kouchi Nobuko, Shiryō: Bosei hogo ronsō (Documents: Motherhood Protection
Debate) (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1984).

(21.) Ichikawa Fusae, et al., eds., Nihon fujin mondai shiryō shūsei (Documents of Issues
in Japanese Women’s History) (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1975–1980).

(22.) Kindai Nihon joseishi e no shōgen (Evidence from the Modern Japanese Women’s
History) (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1979).

(23.) Suzuki Yūko, ed., Nihon josei undō shiryō shūsei (Collected Documents of the
Japanese Women’s Movement) (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1993–1998); and Mizoguchi Akiyo,
Saeki Yōko, and Miki Sōko, eds., Shiryō Nihon ūman ribu-shi (Documents of the History of
the Japanese Women’s Liberation Movement) (Tokyo: Shokado, 1991).

(24.) Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, Women and Social Movements in Modern
Empires since 1820.

(25.) Shidzue Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (originally published by
Farrar and Rinehart, 1935; widely available in a Stanford University Press edition, 1984,
with an introduction and afterword by Barbara Molony); and Hiratsuka Raichō, In the
Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, trans. Teruko Craig (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006).

(26.) Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from
Seitō, 1911–16 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007).

(27.) Women’s Action Network.

Barbara Molony

Department of History, Santa Clara University

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date: 08 February 2019