Jaime V.

Suzuki

Professor Mimura

History 301

6 December 2010

New Voices for Postwar Japanese Women

The first two years of the United States occupation in Japan were a boon for women, at

least on the surface. The new constitution of 1947 gave them the right to vote and more equality

in terms of marriage, divorce, and property. Women also saw doors opened for them in

education, the workplace, and even sports and other traditions. Unfortunately, merely enacting

legislation does not guarantee the end of discriminatory practices. It becomes necessary for us to

explore the deeper implications of these changes. A feminist perspective can shed light on what

literary and historical documents tell us about what really changed for women during the

occupation. These documents show us changes in the boundaries in the spaces women occupied,

the role of their bodies, and their marking as other.

Occupation fiction by women has helped us understand how it may be impossible to posit

a complete separation of public and private spaces for men and women. Michael S. Molasky’s

article “Ambivalent Allegories” dealt with the way these women and their female protagonists

perceived the impact of occupation for their gender. He introduces the issue of public and private

spaces early on in the quotation by John Stuart Mill that ended with this sentence: “There remain

no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.” 1 With this clever paradox—the equating

1
Michael S. Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa (New York: Routledge, 1999), 130.
 Suzuki 2

slave to mistress (the female counterpart of master),—Mills also drew attention to how wives’

slavery had a spatial dimension, as it occurred inside the private space (the house). This division

for Anglo-American societies found its origin in the Victorian era development of assigning

spheres to gender. Men’s domain was the public sphere where they worked and participated in

the political process. Women, on the other hand, were confined to the private or domestic sphere,

with the “consolation prize” of shaping the moral education of children, particularly sons. John

Dower’s Embracing Defeat, a study of Japanese reactions to the occupation, offered us the

modern Japanese counterpart to this phenomenon. In Japan, modern state ideologues had a

phrase for their ideal woman: ryōsai kenbo, “good wife and a wise mother.”2 While Dower

mentioned the obvious subordination of the family to the state, Mills’ paradox subtly implied the

state’s presence when he said that the wife was a legal slave; this subordination originates with

or is condoned by state law.

We must not succumb, however, to the spell of a neat division between private and public

spaces, since this division is one that feminist thought has consistently challenged. With the

popular slogan “the personal is political,” they have sought to disarm the binary thinking

responsible for women’s confinement in the prison of the home. Sono Ayako’s “Guests from

Afar,” the first story that Molasky analyzed, masterfully demonstrated the complications of this

division. The room Captain Lynch, the alpha male in the story, shared with his wife was the

scene of the beating he gave to young Sergeant Rose. The captain first justified his treatment of

Rose in the sergeant’s breaking of a window and constant sneaking of women into the hotel. On

the one hand, for Lynch, the hotel was not a place to be having fraternization with Japanese

women because he considered it a private space for families. On the other hand, the American

2
John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 162.
 Suzuki 3

flag over his bed was a clue that neat demarcations between the public and the private were

impossible. He attempted to have the public realm exist in a neatly demarcated bubble inside the

private space of the room; within this bubble, attention must be fixed unto the flag. The presence

of Namiko, the young Japanese girl that served as the narrator in the story, made Lynch

remember the bubble, and he saw himself obligated to perform the role of a public patriarchal

persona, reminding Rose of the American democratic mission. Rose’s lewd stared at Lynch’s

wife, however, burst open the bubble and Lynch reverted to a private space mentality. He was

then “concerned less with protecting this symbolic body of the nation [the US flag] than with

shielding the physical body of his wife from Rose’s denuding gaze.”3

Lynch’s private concern mirrors the very public fears Japanese men had in regards to the

dangers the occupation posed for Japanese women. Molasky explained: “Japanese men found the

occupation to be humiliating, in part, because they felt a loss of control over women’s bodies –

and, by extension, their own sexuality.”4 If the occupation complicated and blurred the

boundaries between public and private spaces, what it did for the body was to put it into clearer

focus, divorcing it from national rhetoric. Before the end of the war the bodies of Japanese

people were subsumed into the kokutai (national polity or body politic), an abstract

representation of the Japanese national essence. Molasky tried to argue that women benefitted

from the occupation also because they were “less deeply invested in the gendered rhetoric of

Japanese national identity.”5 His elaboration of this point is useful in understanding how the

state’s laws regulating the space women could occupy could limit what they could do with their

bodies and their minds: “They were not permitted to die for the emperor, and as feminist scholar

Ueno Chizuko argues, this was both a manifestation of, and justification for, women’s lack of
3
Molasky, American Occupation, 136-137.
4
Ibid., 132.
5
Ibid., 130.
 Suzuki 4

subjectivity.” Here subjectivity was both the condition of being a “full-fledged imperial subject,”

able to properly serve the empire, and a subject possessing her own thoughts and ethical

concerns. Unfortunately, this explanation did not clarify the advantage for women, who in many

cases felt prostituting themselves to the occupying forces was a worthy way of using their bodies

for the kokutai.6 In that context, writer Tamura Taijirō’s favoring of the nikutai (body of flesh)

over abstract thoughts was a clear repudiation of the controlling policies of the Japanese state

pre-1945.

If the conceptual liberation of women’s bodies offered the potential of greater

opportunities for female freedom and agency in Japan, what about the practices of marking

subordinate groups? This marking occurred inside as well as outside of the stories Molasky

presented. According to him, the Japanese labeled women writers as joryū sakka (literally

“female-style writers”). This label marks women because the male counterpart would simply be

sakka (“author”).7 One of the features of privilege is its “unmarkedness.” The male was equated

to the universal and the norm. The joryū sakka’s proper sphere of influence was necessarily a

fraction of that of the sakka. Of course, female authors were sakka, but they could not extricate

the joryū label from public perception. Female writers needed a large male readership to be

considered full-fledged authors. In other words, Sono, the author of “Guests from After,” needed

the approval of the dominant group to be acknowledged as a reputable literary writer. Inside the

story, Namiko observed how Captain Lynch was naturally oblivious to what went on around

him.8 He did not need to evaluate his place in Japanese society and the implications of

occupation on the native population the way Namiko felt compelled to.

6
Dower, Embracing Defeat, 127.
7
Molasky, American Occupation, 134.
8
Ibid., 139.
 Suzuki 5

The most clearly marked women during the occupation were the Panpan girls, or

prostitutes that catered largely to the occupational forces. Their blatant disregard of Japan’s

social conventions and their lower class, guaranteed a marginalized place as subversive beings.9

However, their gaudy outfits did not only serve to marginalize them but also enabled them to

display Hollywood glamour.10 Therefore, the perceptions Japanese had of panpan were

ambivalent. The general population could feel scorn at the same time as fascination and even

envy for them. The signs of marking for the wives in Hirabayashi Taiko’s “The Women of

Chitose, Hokkaido” were more subtle and entangled. Tsumako, a former bar hostess, married a

petit bourgeois. Noticing her material and sexual discontent, she fantasized of having trysts with

GIs for money, but for some reason middle class code held her back. In Molasky’s account we

cannot see exactly what she thought of her husband, so we cannot examine if the only thing she

needed was material stability and the enjoyment of power over her husband in her cash

transaction with him in bed. Ruriko, the wealthy wife of an older financier, is even more of an

enigma. Because of her family wealth she was able to have a sexual relation with a black GI

without demanding money from him. Her embrace of the ultimate “other” during the period,

marked himself with animal qualities (only good for physical activity), signaled an erosion of the

norms wishing to keep racial purity. However, despite her “freedom” she was unwilling or

unable (we are not sure which) to repudiate the norms of domestic patriarchy, instead repudiating

her mixed child.

The postwar period made women aware that the boundaries between private and public

spaces were not fixed, and their permeability could allow them to navigate the different spaces.

Women also learned that their bodies were freer, since they were not expected to conform to any

9
Dower, Embracing Defeat, 133.
10
Ibid., 136-137.
 Suzuki 6

allegory of the nation that truncated their identity as members of society. Finally, they learned

that marking was a fact of life, not only for prostitutes and their flashy appearance, but also for

wives that still had an uncomfortable relation with the expectations society had of them and even

for writers of fiction themselves. The picture was extremely complex and work was undoubtedly

necessary to achieve more equality, but the insights from female literature and other select

sources in the occupation, gave us valuable tools for awareness of remaining problems and

strategies to overcome them.